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Audiences averse to horror movies, videogames, or horror movies based on videogames, take note: Resident Evil is technically all of those things, but a lot better than the market standard, and smarter.
As written and directed by Zach Cregger, whose unnerving suburban horror-thriller Weapons scored an Oscar last year, the new Resident Evil has little in common with the eight franchise entries that preceded it. An ex-comedic performer from the sketch comic group Whitest Kids U’Know, Cregger’s filmmaking career has followed a similar trajectory to the one that Jordan Peele launched a decade ago with Get Out. Both storytellers excel at twisting humor into horror and horror into humor until they become indistinguishable.
Sometimes, directors will take a paycheck gig and quickly find themselves devoured by the material. Resident Evil takes the opposite route. Gamers may appreciate its moment-to-moment intensity, but that’s not a prerequisite for enjoying the logic of its mayhem. This is fun, outrageous escapism with a dollop of brains for good measure.
Cregger has delivered a tight action-thriller that unfolds across one night, with one gripping sequence leading to the next. At its center, Austin Abrams delivers a slapstick performance as wayward medical courier Bryan, who winds up marooned in a snowstorm just in time to contend with a mutating disease that transforms people into flesh-hungry monstrosities.
In 87 relentless minutes, Bryan navigates a shadowy landscape, wields a shotgun at various unexpected tentacled beasts, and hitches a ride with an equally goofy lab technician (Paul Walter Hauser) en route to the post-apocalyptic Raccoon City. Once there, poor Bryan’s Job-like tribulations only intensify, as he evades a hailstorm of suicidal undead and scales a disaster-stricken skyscraper in a race to deliver a serum to some wide-eyed researchers seemingly capable of setting everything right.
From a narrative standpoint, that’s all she wrote — and it’s sufficient for the immediate entertainment factor in play. Lots of bloody hijinks ensue in a pileup of ludicrous twists that hover in a liberating space between fear and farce: You know that visceral feeling when something jolts you and, moments later, makes you laugh at your own vulnerability? Resident Evil thrives there.
On one level, this kind of ride doubles down on its emptiness. Alfred Hitchcock would dub the serum the movie’s “MacGuffin,” an empty device with the sole purpose of keeping the plot in motion. And indeed, the final chapter of Resident Evil builds a ludicrous amount of tension around the fate of that aforementioned serum, toying with the stakes to amusing effect.
At the same time, Resident Evil largely succeeds because it has more going on than pure shock value. Bryan’s a quicky anti-hero who shrugs off his girlfriend over speaker phone when she brings up their accidental pregnancy (“It’s your body, your choice,” he says, almost as an afterthought). The movie delivers some ghastly imagery, including a bloody egg sack, rat-infested guts, and a ghoulish figure vomiting acid down an elevator shaft, but almost always with an immediate cutaway to Abrams’ baffled expression, which underscores the absurdity of the circumstances and injects them with comedic glee. (Film theorists call it “the Kuleshov Effect.”)
Resident Evil is intent on absurdity, but it turns on genuine dread. Cregger has said that he wrote the movie in part to deal with his own lingering fears of parenthood, and certainly Resident Evil can be read in those terms. But it also taps into broader anxieties around a world changing faster than any one person could ever process. Its climax, which finds a bunch of scientists scrambling through a laboratory with all the finesse of the Keystone Kops, plays like cartoonish distillation of pandemic-era fears. Pumping this conceit through the language of a giant blockbuster, Cregger basically invites the whole world to look in the mirror and laugh.
The zombie genre has its roots in disturbing self-reflection. George A. Romero’s original Night of the Living Dead hit screens in 1968, when the furor around the Vietnam War and Civil Rights brought America to a boiling point not unlike recent times. Yes, the zombies in that movie are little more than actors in eyeshadow lurching around with dazed expressions. Even so, the climactic moments arrive as an editorial gut punch. Sole survivor Duane Jones, a Black man who has managed to stave off zombie invaders over the course of a dangerous night, winds up shot to death by police officers on the scene, in a direct confrontation with the real-world racial biases that remain an endemic problem to this day.
Cregger’s movie doesn’t cut that deep, but it does feel zeitgeisty on a number of levels. Ending with the desperate attempt to fix unsolvable problem, Resident Evil manages to turn genuinely scary threats into a prolonged dark punchline. Sometimes, it’s the sickest jokes that count the most, those welcome reminders that even in dire times things could be a whole lot worse.
Resident Evil is now playing at the Southampton Playhouse.