Resident Evil is now playing in theaters.
By Elazar Abrahams
Resident Evil rocks! Zach Cregger is quickly becoming one of my favorite horror directors and one of the most exciting filmmakers working in Hollywood today. Going from Barbarian to Weapons to this in the span of four years is a ridiculous run, and his take on Resident Evil may be his most technically impressive trick yet.
Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a medical courier whose final delivery of the night pulls him into the unfolding nightmare in Raccoon City. I have never played a Resident Evil game, but I have spent plenty of time with third-person and first-person adventures, including horror titles like The Last of Us and Silent Hill. This is the closest any movie has come to making me feel like I was actually playing one.
That is no small feat, especially because watching somebody else play a video game is not exactly a foolproof recipe for riveting cinema. But Cregger builds the movie around that feeling without letting it become a gimmick. Bryan starts with a pistol and discovers better weapons as he goes. He rummages through drawers in abandoned houses for bullets and supplies. The environments unfold like levels, moving him from one contained setting to the next as the night gets progressively worse.
Even the camera gets in on it. Abrams is the only person on screen for much of the runtime and the only character we really spend quality time with. The camera frequently hangs over his shoulder, then occasionally switches into a first-person view down the barrel of his rifle. You are not simply watching Bryan explore this world. You feel like you are exploring it with him, nervously checking every corner with your flickering flashlight and wondering what is about to leap into frame.
And boy, do things leap into frame. The monsters are legitimately creepy, with an abandoned maternity ward sequence standing out as particularly chilling. As the movie reveals new wrinkles of the evil virus creating these zombie-like creatures, everything becomes more unsettling. Cregger wisely avoids stopping the action for a massive lore dump. He throws the audience into a completely insane situation and trusts us to keep up without caring too much about the “why.”
He also remains a master of the jump scare. Sometimes you know one is coming, but he still finds a way to make it land. The creature jumps from a different part of the screen than the spot you have been staring at, or the scare arrives just one beat later than your brain has prepared for. It is simple misdirection, executed with almost mean precision.
Abrams is great, too. A lot of the movie rests on his shoulders, and he fully delivers. Bryan is scared, exhausted, resourceful, and just funny enough to keep the experience from becoming relentlessly grim. Abrams sells all of it without turning him into an action hero who suddenly knows exactly what to do.
The comedy is where the movie occasionally stumbles. I mostly enjoyed the heightened absurdity of Bryan’s situation, and horror-comedy is an incredibly difficult tone to balance. But a few humorous sequences drag on too long enough and puncture the tension. One scene involving Paul Walter Hauser, in particular, kept pushing well past the point where I was ready to return to the nightmare.
Those moments hold the movie back from being even better. Still, Resident Evil is scary, inventive, extremely fun, and somehow captures the rhythm of playing a survival-horror game without feeling like a two-hour cutscene. Cregger has done it again.
I give Resident Evil an A-.
