Resident Evil ★★★½

Bryan (Austin Abrams) is an ordinary young man. He is finishing up his latest job, the delivery of an organ to a hospital, and is arguing with his girlfriend Michelle (Sara Paxton) on the phone. As he prepares to leave and head home, he is called over by a nurse and offered the chance to make a “Schedule A” delivery, the highest priority and promising bonus pay, to Raccoon City. After initially being ready to call it a day and hash things out with Michelle in-person, Bryan quickly changes his tune when he hears about the extra money and even lies about having the gear on his car – namely chains for his tires – that will help him traverse the snowy mountain terrain leading to the city. This is simply too good of a chance to pass up. In Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, Bryan will be taken into hell as Raccoon City and its outskirts have become overrun with something unfathomable.

The video game franchise Resident Evil has been adapted into films before, most notably by director Paul W.S. Anderson and starring Milla Jovovich. Cregger, a fan of the games, admitted to having never seen these films but rather trying to tackle the franchise from a new perspective, not adapting a story from the game for the big screen but rather creating a story that could live in that video game universe. The result is a propulsive, terrifying, and exciting horror film that mixes in first-person scenes, the tension and suspense over what could be lurking in every set-piece Bryan stumbles on, and full of gags, gaffs, and quirks that feel like a player trying to traverse a landscape they are unfamiliar with but know is fraught with the improbable. Cregger, as he has done before, creates a world sitting just above abject terror with untold horrors lurking in the shadows and timing out the jump scares, frights, and excitement to perfection. One never knows what Bryan will encounter next or what obstacle will be placed in his way as he tries to get to Raccoon City with this unknown delivery, but there is always something and Cregger paces Resident Evil wonderfully, making great use of every setup and location before ultimately leaving it awash in horror and Lovecraftian creatures.

Resident Evil finds Cregger working comfortably in his strengths. As with, especially, Barbarian before it, Resident Evil is loaded with moments that leave the audience begging the character to turn around and run away before whatever is waiting for him to drop his guard to jump out. Bryan is a character who has no idea he is in a horror movie until it is too late, stopping on abandoned roads to wander into the woods, trying to help a little girl in an abandoned RV, or getting a bit too close to a humongous humanoid man in a sewer, leading to skin crawling and nerve-rattling encounters that have one jumping and terrified of what could come next. What Bryan’s struggles highlight is that he and the other characters are real people in surreal conditions. In both Barbarian and Weapons, Cregger’s ability to write and develop well-rounded characters shines through and Resident Evil is no exception. Bryan, a young man terrified of becoming a father before he thought he was ready, is fighting with Michelle over what they will do about her recent pregnancy discovery. His humanity and empathy is his great undoing during this ordeal. What has befallen Raccoon City is due to the work of a shadowy defensive contractor, the Umbrella Corporation, who along with only caring about what they can create and not whether they should, is fraught with individuals – most notably Dr. Paul (Paul Walter Hauser) and Dr. Carl (Zach Cherry) – who are clumsy or careless with their vital research and activities. Resident Evil is a film about the thin veil between us and horror. Bryan is just a normal guy going through life when he is thrust into this. The Umbrella Corporation was experimenting without any of the city residents’s knowledge. At any moment, our lives can be upended and our everyday problems can seem miniscule in the face of a fight to survive.

Austin Abrams is great at this balance, this headstrong and often immature young man thrust into a situation he cannot comprehend. Abrams is charismatic and able to provide levity with some of his goofy commentary along the way, comfortably shouldering the load of carrying Resident Evil from beginning to end. Abrams’ shift over the course of events from unaware to terrified to almost annoyed that these encounters with creatures and entities keep happening to him make for a varied and authentic response to the stimuli he is inundated with. Bryan is impulsive and often accidentally making things harder on himself, a quality Abrams sells well with his sudden realizations that he screwed up or bewilderment over how to use a gun all coming across authentically. There is a nuance and a subtle skill with which Abrams expresses Bryan’s newbie-like qualities, fiddling with his hands like one fiddles with a game controller. Abrams’ chemistry with Paul Walter Hauser makes their scene together quite funny with the pair bouncing off of one another very well once an Umbrella-employed enforcer Maxine (Kali Reis) disappears from view to kill off some creatures in Raccoon City. Their shared glances, commentary, and debate over what to do if she does not return right away, make for a scene that is a comedic stand-out. 

In its technical aspects, Resident Evil impresses further. The cinematography from Dariusz Wolski is consistently excellent, in particular making great use of available lighting. Whether it is car headlights, city streets, moonlight, phone light, or the natural brightness of snow, Resident Evil is a film set at night that does not become crushed with darkness. It also makes the scenes that have absolute darkness in them all the more potent, in particular a scene inside a seemingly abandoned farmhouse. The dark sits in the background and as Bryan goes rummaging through cabinets looking for shotgun bullets, suddenly one knows why that darkness was there in the first place. When it comes to the virus-infected people, darkness embraces that the fear of the unknown is often more terrifying than what we can see. Thus, as a body is dragged into the dark distance by something unseen, one can only imagine what entity is pulling it along. The cinematography is especially impressive in the action scenes, the camera whirling in circles as Bryan is chased by a woman overtaken by this virus around a car or cutting between low-angle shots and tracking shots as Bryan races along a busy street of parked cars as bodies rain down on him from above. The soft golden glow of the city street lights punctuated by snow and bloody entrails makes for a horrifying and exciting scene. The first-person scenes also impress in their execution, not dropping the viewer into a direct POV shot but rather almost sitting on Bryan’s shoulder. It makes for immersive and video game-esque scenes that are not too frequent to feel gimmicky, but are instead deployed at the right time. In lock-step with this visual style is Resident Evil’s great production design and visual effects. The map it creates with one always cognizant of how far off Bryan is from the hospital, some of the goopy and gory effects (the maternity ward scene is a real stunner), and the unholy entities it creates when the virus takes over that is both impressive work of effects and make-up help to bring to life what Resident Evil offers in a visceral and unnerving way.

Over the past few years, Zach Cregger has established himself as one of the most exciting directors working in horror. Resident Evil continues that trend with an exciting and video game-esque survival horror film anchored by humanity, creating a world not too dissimilar from our own with real people thrust into a surreal situation they are ill-equipped to understand. Thrilling and unnerving in its portrayal of how easily our lives can suddenly be upended and in how one’s humanity and fallibility can only exacerbate those problems, Resident Evil may be science fiction but its strong and authentic human foundation makes its scares and pathos all the more potent. With great cinematography, production design, make-up, and a wonderful lead performance from Austin Abrams, Resident Evil is a thrill ride.