Despite enjoying last year’s Weapons quite a bit, I was on the verge of skipping director Zach Creggar’s take on the Resident Evil franchise until the allure of a Shocktober review reared its head. This is probably due to the fact that my skepticism of video game movies pervades while my interest in video games in general is at an all-time low. Fortunately, this Resident Evil owes much of its premise to the games it takes inspiration from, but it also has plenty of appeal for lapsed gamers like myself as well as the franchise faithful. While it maybe runs into some limitations of being an adaptation that has already been milked dry by a critically derided film series and many video games, it still offers the kind of high-tension thrills that are still getting folks out to see horror movies these days.
We see Resident Evil exclusively through the eyes of Bryan (played by Austin Abrams), a medical courier just trying to go home after a long day of delivering various bodily organs. However, he gets a request to make one last delivery to Raccoon City, so he drives his car through the blinding snow when he all of a sudden hits a woman who has wandered out onto the road. Feeling guilty about hitting her, he ventures into the woods to find her and sees that she still seems to be alive, if badly injured. He wrestles her into his car in the hopes of taking her to a hospital, but is almost immediately stopped by a cop who agrees to take the woman. The car then swerves off the road, and Bryan tries to call someone on the police car’s radio, but is attacked by the seemingly rabid, zombie-like woman and eventually manages to shoot her with the cop’s gun.
He then makes his way to a nearby farm, where he encounters a couple who are acting just as aggressively and bloodthirsty as the woman he encountered earlier. He manages to shoot both of them with a shotgun he’s found, but is increasingly shocked by the damage that guns do to these people since they’re not his area of expertise. One unsettling thing he sees is the way the bodies of the couple have these tendrils that emerge from their bodies after they’ve supposedly been killed and link with each other. Escaping the farm, Bryan makes it closer to civilization after an encounter with a young girl with similar tendrils growing out of her foot, but is then rescued by a cop and a slimy employee of Umbrella Corporation (Paul Walter Hauser), who explains that what’s in the satchel Bryan’s been carrying around is a serum for the outbreak that happened at a lab in Raccoon City. However, both of these people quickly meet undesirable fates, which leaves Bryan to fend for himself again.
Bryan makes his way to a hospital where he needs to hand off the serum to a group of scientists, but of course is flanked by all sorts of other goopy creatures, most prominently “the amalgam”, a ball of human limbs that seems intent on absorbing Bryan into itself. When Bryan does eventually reach the hospital, he finds that a bite he incurred earlier has infected him and spread to the entirety of his arm. He then contemplates his reluctance toward becoming a father when he gets a call on the elevator intercom from one of the scientists. This then sets Bryan out on the task of climbing all of the stairs of the 28-story building. Which, sees him encountering more mutated humans as well as the scientists in the lab before having one final encounter with the same amorphous creature that’s been chasing him this entire time.
I feel like the thing I kept hearing about this movie before seeing it was that Bryan’s arc felt very akin to the experience of playing a video game you’ve never played before: you start off not knowing what you’re doing, you get your ass kicked a little, you get the hang of the world, and you ultimately kill some bad guys. I would completely agree that this is an impressive trick that the movie pulls off, especially because except for a few overt video game-esque moments, it seamlessly feels like part of this one dude’s story of learning how to navigate an apocalyptic outbreak. And luckily, star Austin Abrams is very good at striking a balance between an unremarkable avatar and having just enough personality while flailing about. That said, his overuse of the word “bitch” felt a little too much like I was watching Jesse Pinkman in an early season of Breaking Bad.
I would also say that the movie’s use of perspective, and how that parallels video game storytelling, is quite effective. We really only see things from Bryan’s perspective and end up being just as confused about what’s going on. Because of this, the movie doesn’t feel too preoccupied with explaining to the audience what exactly is going on as we see these hordes of grotesque humanoids attacking our incredibly reluctant hero, save for a few short expository scenes here and there. This gives the notion that you can fill in the blanks if you’ve played the Resident Evil games, or if you haven’t, you’ve probably seen enough movies in which frightful things like this ravage society. Or you know, you just might happen to remember this global outbreak-type event that happened six years ago. The point is, it’s a familiar story, so it’s not worth belaboring the point.
This probably also explains why the movie is only 90 minutes long, leaning into the thrills and chills of trying to survive something insane instead of lingering on the small details. The movie is a testament to Zach Creggar’s growing confidence in being able to play an audience like a fiddle, delivering a laugh one minute, and executing something horrific the next. Really, my only huge qualm with the movie is rooted in its status as a product of IP, and that’s that nothing that ultimately happens in it is all that surprising. I think a big part of the abundance of great horror movies to come out in the past decade or so is that it’s a mainstream genre where a lot of original ideas have been allowed to flourish. This has resulted in a lot of great horror movies where things are just a little too weird for you to have a clear idea of where exactly this story is going.
Resident Evil, on the other hand, you kind of know where the movie is going, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a really entertaining ride getting to where it’s going. There is an inherently nihilistic bent to Creggar’s brand of horror that makes it seem like everything is doomed and no one’s getting out unscathed that feels particularly suited for this material. However, this tone doesn’t necessarily seem suited for franchise filmmaking, which does make this whole endeavor feel like another refreshing case of a studio letting a director cook with the IP they’ve been bequeathed.