Los Angeles, CA – Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is his After Hours, except Martin Scorsese’s nocturnal tribulations in Soho have been relocated to Raccoon City, where the night keeps taking increasingly grotesque T-virus liberties with the human form. Cregger could have found no better Paul Hackett for this ordeal than Austin Abrams, whose Bryan seems forever one minor affront to his peace away from needing to lie down. He is a medical courier who takes an ill-advised final delivery through a snowstorm for extra money, hits a woman with his car, discovers that she may be a zombie, gets stopped by a policeman, loses his car, and then spends the remaining 97-minute nightmare shooting at things with comical incompetence.
Bryan has the unfortunate occupational fatalism of a desperate gig worker, coupled with the survival instincts of an NPC whose principal contribution to the plot is usually a sad little note explaining how he died. Cregger knows just how funny it is to perpetually keep him in that state, so every time Bryan acquires some semblance of control, the film periodically removes it again. Abrams plays every stage of that humiliation with aplomb. It is genuinely difficult to think of another recent performance so completely calibrated to the specific idiocy of survival-horror. Most of his dialogue sounds like live commentary on his own impending death.
The film had some serious franchise baggage to shake off. Cregger simply leaves most of that luggage behind. Leon, Ada, Claire, and Wesker are nowhere to be found, and Bryan has absolutely no need to understand Umbrella’s sprawling corporate pathology before he can get through the next door. The funny thing is that Cregger seems to understand the Resident Evil games at the basest level of their most perversely specific habits. The typewriters and green herbs are obvious nods, but the gun and its ammunition being stranded in entirely different parts of the building is almost comically faithful to the games.
Cregger draws on John Carpenter and Sam Raimi for his exaggerated creature designs, and this is where his appetite for practical horror becomes especially satisfying. He stages a full mutilated extravaganza including the alien-dog from The Thing, a skyborne parade of exploding corpses, a Baron Harkonnen lookalike whose stomach erupts into rats, and the same woman Bryan first runs his car into, who pursues him through the night while repeatedly evolving into a Rat King-like grotesque.
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A minor gripe is that the film’s lean runtime leaves its supporting players underfed, with Paul Walter Hauser and Kali Reis having to shoulder the job of explaining the outbreak. That said, Cregger has genuinely pulled a defining feat here, capturing the experience of playing a game without asking you to pick up a controller. Resident Evil is currently running in theatres.
