Directed by Zach Cregger (Barbarian; Weapons) — Screenplay by Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten.
The Resident Evil franchise is one of horror gaming’s most popular, and yet it has struggled to find the same critical success on the big screen that it has reached through multiple video games. The Paul W. S. Anderson-shepherded films starring Milla Jovovich made money, but none of the six Jovovich-led films resonated with critics or audiences. Johannes Roberts’ Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City from 2021 was meant as a more faithful adaptation of the early Resident Evil games, but still, audiences and critics were left underwhelmed. Now Zach Cregger is giving it a go, following his critically lauded horror-thriller films Barbarian and Weapons. The on-the-rise horror filmmaker with a keen understanding of how to plant comedic beats in even the darkest storylines has opted for a different strategy than Roberts. Cregger has deliberately decided that he would not slavishly recreate the story of the games. However, he has nonetheless managed to honor the games in his own way while, at the same time, turning in a genuinely thrilling film.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil follows Bryan (played by Austin Abrams), a twenty-something medical courier, who, against his girlfriend’s wishes, takes on an extra last-minute package. Bryan is to rush this package to the general hospital in Raccoon City and defy the harsh snow on the road to get there. However, Bryan is about to find out that it isn’t just the snow on the roads that he has to overcome to complete this ‘mission.’ After he crashes into a woman crossing the road — and goes to investigate if she’s okay — it soon becomes clear that something unnatural is happening tonight of all nights. The woman is not only injured but infected with some kind of virus that turns her into a flesh-eating monster that begins to chase him. It turns out a viral outbreak is happening in Raccoon City that is rapidly turning people into different versions of these infected monstrosities. Bryan is both headed right for it and carrying something extremely valuable.
Although Resident Evil is one of the most popular and well-known horror video game franchises, it is also one that has morphed a couple of times over the years and transformed into something slightly or wholly different. There are third-person games, first-person games, games with fixed angles, and games with a player-controlled camera. There are big city zombie apocalypse games, there’s a swampy Southern gothic horror game, there’s a gothic horror game with more classic horror monsters, and so on and so forth. There are moments in these games that are grim and serious and dark, and then there’s also often room for cheesy action hero quips. I am saying all of this to establish that while there certainly are things that one will associate more with Resident Evil than other things, it is sometimes a bit of a sandbox that you can play around in. Zach Cregger has taken that liberty.
For the Resident Evil die-hards, I can say that, like the trailers indicated, this isn’t a Leon S. Kennedy or Claire Redfield film. So, while this film is very much set around an outbreak day, it is Cregger doing his own thing. I would liken it to putting an NPC (non-playable character) into the lead role of a Resident Evil game set around the time of the classic Resident Evil 2 video game, only with monsters that maybe feel more close to the Las Plagas virus from Resident Evil 4 than the police station zombies that fans would know from outbreak day. Speaking with a language distinctly more centered around cinema, the simplest comparison is that of John Carpenter’s The Thing. In this film, bodies come apart, tentacles grow on the body, and genuinely disgusting transformations happen. There’s Cronenbergian body-horror thrown in there, as well. Indeed, Cregger’s inspirations are relatively clear to see.
Cregger’s film is very much a horror film, but like with Barbarian and Weapons, there are moments where comedy bursts into scenes. I distinctly remember watching Weapons with a crowd, and I marvelled at how masterfully Cregger had designed a scene which transforms from horror then into comedy and then back to horror again (i.e., the haircut scene that is mostly set inside of a car). Cregger does the same thing again here. For instance, there’s a scene early in the film, where he’s being chased by a zombie-adjacent character, who starts chasing him around a car, only to then disappear from view. It’s such an excellent example of how Cregger understands a genre-fluidity from horror to comedy to suspense and back to horror again. It’s so thrilling and it keeps you on your toes. Though I will say that some horror sequences look a little bit too computer-generated.
Although I did read somewhere, that he deliberately removed a lot of comedy following test screenings, there is no denying that comedy is very much a part of the final product. I found it to be just as funny as it is unsettling. Cregger has been very open about citing Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2 as an inspiration, and you can definitely see Raimi all over this film, including in its crazy and irreverent final act, which you can totally imagine Cregger laughing maniacally about when he came up with it. Cregger very much does inspire you to sit with a grin on your face, just as he wants you to jump in horror. And I have to admit that I did. It’s been quite a long time since a jump-scare truly got me. But there’s a note-perfect jump-scare in the film’s farmhouse sequence, in which Bryan is awaiting a phone call and watching someone move towards him from outside the house. It’s one of several examples of Cregger having made a film that shows such excellent confidence in his own abilities, tricks, and set-pieces. I should also say that it is so refreshing to see a major American horror film that is so gutsy and unafraid of crossing lines, when it comes to what audiences are okay with seeing happen in a horror film.
Cregger should be commended for how he honors and has fun with the mechanics, or the feel, of the video games. Although there is one exposition-dump type scene with Paul Walter Hauser — which, I’ll admit, seemed ever so slightly off-tone to me (even though there’s a lot of good in and around this Hauser-centric sequence) — Cregger’s references are mostly mechanical. There’s a fun bit about whether or not you can shoot off padlocks that directly references a classic video game scenario (and the puzzles of Resident Evil games), whenever he gets a gun it feels like he’s leveling up (or reached a key milestone in a game), there’s a save room, he has to search for ammunition, and there are even first-person shooter type of shots that are executed really well.
At the center of it all, we find Austin Abrams, who Cregger established a relationship with in Weapons. Here Abrams is so good at playing his character as a freaked out, jittery mess who’s constantly uttering profanities, as he has been thrown into the deep end. Abrams plays him in a relatable and likable way, even if his character is only in this mess because he stupidly didn’t meet his girlfriend’s demands. It is very much an After Hours-esque ‘one crazy night’ type of film, where our protagonist is put through the wringer for his anxiety about potentially becoming a father.
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil isn’t just the best film in this particular franchise; it also happens to be easily the best video game film adaptation. It is a perfectly paced thrill ride of a film with a note-perfect balancing act of both horror and comedy elements. It’s a masterclass in making a video game film adaptation that honors the mechanics of the original video games in such a way that it never feels clunky or reliant solely on easter eggs. Cregger doesn’t take the story too seriously, but he also doesn’t make fun of it. He has simply mined all the comedy out of the story situations, while somehow still retaining that gory and horrifying aspect that makes this feel appropriate in this particular franchise. It is thoroughly entertaining from start to finish, and it feels so confidently made. It is laugh-out-loud funny, it genuinely almost made me jump out of my seat through a note-perfect jump-scare, and it is super gory and bloody. Cregger nailed it.
8.5 out of 10
– Review written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
