Review: Resident Evil

The strangest thing about Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is that it works best when it forgets it is supposed to be Resident Evil. That may sound like faint praise for a video game adaptation, especially one carrying nearly three decades of lore, labyrinthine mansions, police stations, viruses, corporations, and fan expectations. But Cregger understands something many franchise films miss: fidelity is not the same thing as quotation. He is less interested in dragging familiar characters through familiar hallways than in recreating the awful, hilarious feeling of being underprepared, low on ammo, and absolutely certain the next door is a mistake.

Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a medical courier whose terrible night begins with one extra job in a snowstorm. He is not a soldier, cop, chosen one, or quippy superhero in waiting. He is a tired guy doing gig work, which turns out to be a perfect entry point into Raccoon City’s latest biological nightmare. Bryan’s delivery run becomes a survival-horror obstacle course, escalating from icy roads and bad decisions to mutated bodies, corporate malfeasance, and creatures that look like they were designed during a fever dream.

Abrams is the film’s secret weapon. Bryan is cowardly, funny, selfish, decent, and frequently stupid in exactly the way a normal person might be stupid while trying not to die. He curses, panics, talks to himself, overestimates his competence, then immediately pays for it. The performance gives the movie a human center without sanding off the character’s rough edges. Bryan is not someone we admire so much as someone we recognize. He is the guy in a horror movie who goes into the dark room, but Cregger and Abrams make us understand why he thinks that dark room might be his best bad option.

Cregger’s direction has the same strength he brought to Barbarian and Weapons: he knows how to turn geography into anxiety. The early stretch is especially strong, moving Bryan through a series of practical problems that slowly become impossible ones. A road, a car, a farmhouse, a locked door, a drawer with nothing useful in it; these are simple objects, but Cregger treats them like pressure plates. The film’s video game structure is obvious, but rarely gimmicky. Bryan advances, fails, improvises, finds the wrong tool, circles back, and survives by inches. It is adaptation as muscle memory.

The horror is also nastier than expected. Resident Evil has always been a franchise of wet sounds and bad science, and this film embraces both. The creature work is often grotesque in a pleasingly tactile way, favoring meat, slime, bone, and rupture over weightless digital chaos. When the film keeps its monsters close and its stakes immediate, it becomes genuinely scary. One infected body in a room can do more damage to the nerves than an army of anonymous undead, and Cregger knows the value of making the audience sit with one impossible thing for a beat too long.

The final act is where the movie loses some of its precision. As the scope widens and the mythology pushes its way in, the clean propulsion of the first hour gets a little muddy. The film begins as a nightmare about a man trying to complete a job he should have refused; it ends closer to the kind of franchise machinery it had been cleverly sidestepping. It is still entertaining, and there are images here with real bite, but the movie becomes less personal as it gets bigger.

Even so, this is easily the most satisfying Resident Evil film, and more importantly, one of the rare video game movies that seems to understand play as feeling rather than plot summary. Cregger does not solve every problem that comes with turning Capcom’s sprawling mythology into a lean 90-minute horror ride, but he finds a sturdy angle: one man, one night, too many locked doors, and something breathing on the other side.

Resident Evil is messy, funny, gross, and surprisingly controlled until it isn’t. For a franchise that has spent years mutating on screen, this is the rare infection worth spreading.

3.5/5