Zach Cregger’s RESIDENT EVIL Plays Its Audience

I was not a fan of Zach Cregger’s BARBARIAN. Those who saw it early at Comic-Con and FightFest touted a revelatory twist beyond the shadows of the Airbnb basement Georgina Campbell’s Tess ventured into. Despite how gratingly tasteless that incest zombie payoff ended up being, I could not drop one intriguing suspicion from my mind: “Man, this guy must play a lot of Resident Evil.” The influence of the foundational survival horror video game series runs bone-deep through BARBARIAN and Cregger’s vastly superior follow up, WEAPONS: characters venturing into blatantly malevolent spaces out of a sense of altruism, desperation, or some combination of the two; decrepit, charismatic villains insurmountable to the average person; complete disregard for the human body once it has been contorted into something more feral. 

Turns out, I was right (for once). 

Cregger dives into the sandbox that shaped his sensibility with a childlike glee that bleeds through the screen harder than the numerous bodily fluids that appear throughout RESIDENT EVIL. I couldn’t stop imagining him grinning like an idiot behind the camera as he subjects poor Austin Abrams to the 93-minute onslaught of gruesome set pieces that he likely began envisioning as a teenager with Hollywood dreams. 

We meet medical courier Bryan Hodukavich (Abrams) on a night that already sucks. His previous delivery was late, likely because of bickering with his newly pregnant girlfriend Michelle. He knows that he needs to go home—but a nurse suddenly offers him the chance to be paid double for a delivery “outside the zone.” Time to be a provider. As he ventures through the dark and snowy outskirts of Raccoon City, another argument with Michelle causes him to zone out and slam into a woman crossing the street. Said woman quickly reveals herself to be a zombie, forcing Bryan into what becomes a relentless fight for survival as the apocalyptic T-Virus takes hold of all who dare to cross its path. 

Cregger has enraged certain sectors of RESIDENT EVIL’s fandom by opting to apply his talents to an original story that takes place on the fringes of the franchise’s second entry. He’s described his approach as a self-insert fantasy. What might a goofy guy like him do when faced with the series’ incomprehensible horrors, while combat-trained Leon Kennedy or Jill Valentine run into the fray with determination and hypercompetence? Regardless of how skillfully Cregger brought this world to life, it would be moot if his (and in turn, our) avatar was irritating. Instead, we’re treated to a star-making turn from Austin Abrams that harnesses all of the film’s chaos. After a string of largely generic post-EUPHORIA turns, Abrams was a surprise standout as strung-out drug addict James in WEAPONS. In that film, he was the first character to truly understand the depth of wickedness the town of Maybrook was facing. His frantic attempts to convince others fell on deaf ears. In RESIDENT EVIL, Bryan spends most of the film solo. It’s tricky to be tasked with persuading other characters to buy into the story; it’s a herculean effort to be completely responsible for the audience. Abrams delivers the type of performance that may someday inspire young people to act in horror films, expertly co-curating a dynamic between dramatic tension and comedic catharsis with Cregger.

Bryan does not get a moment of peace, faced with numerous traumatizing challenges along his journey. Yet this protagonist does not respond to his circumstances with morose sadness for quite a while—there’s no time for anguish. Instead, he moves through this situation with the cadence of a millennial forced to survive another historical event: sarcastic, slightly apathetic, and determined to gas himself up enough to summon the will to deal with whatever comes next. While he’s never outright bumbling, Abrams also capitalizes on Bryan’s lack of physical conditioning for huge laughs. Despite how much he is handling, he never makes this feel like a tacky everyman shtick. He is just that authentically relatable. Cregger relishes his torment. 

I spent a lot of time trying to imagine how Cregger would adapt the visual language of RESIDENT EVIL before we had any trailers to go on. Mainly, I wondered if he would stage entire sequences to look like gameplay. Perhaps we’d plant ourselves in the iconic “over-the-shoulder” camera angle pioneered by RESIDENT EVIL 4, or dip into first-person to explore a zombie lair. While these flourishes are sprinkled in, the film never descends into pure re-enactment. Instead, Cregger and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski operate the camera as if it is being guided by an invisible finger on a PlayStation controller’s right analog stick. We constantly find ourselves gazing at the negative space just ahead of Bryan, nervously surveying the room for whatever creature is inevitably going to accost him for the next few minutes. This technique is achieved so effectively that at one point an audience member in my theater shouted, “Now why do we have to go first?” as Bryan explored an abandoned cottage during the first act. 

When it is time to shift into gory set piece mode, Cregger stacks the odds so ridiculously against Bryan that all we can do is hang onto his every step as he cowers away. Many filmmakers over the decades have tried to imitate the playfully ghastly body mutilations that Sam Raimi popularized in THE EVIL DEAD. Cregger delivers a movie that could be credited to the man himself without anyone batting an eye. This virus doesn’t just spawn disgusting zombies, it toys with whatever body parts become scraps. Bryan is often frozen for a moment by the innate empathy that Cregger adeptly trains his audience to drop with extreme prejudice. That tension is infectious to witness in a sold-out theater. RESIDENT EVIL would be worth seeing in an empty theater, but it is mandatory viewing for anyone hoping to learn how to hold a crowd in the palm of your hands while many of them watch through their fingers. 

Despite my enjoyment, I’m hesitant to label RESIDENT EVIL as a new horror landmark or even Cregger’s best work. In particular, his reluctance to fully tap into the source material stops him from creating any truly memorable villains. Ethan’s adversaries are mostly feral mutants who only exist to chase after him. We don’t get an encounter with a more sentient beast like VILLAGE’s Lady Dimitrescu or BIOHAZARD’s Jack Baker: someone, or some thing, that would make us more aware of the humanity underneath in a more transgressive way. Perhaps he felt that an attempt at a character like this would feel derivative of Amy Madigan’s Oscar-winning turn as Aunt Gladys, but it also robs his film of something that could elevate it just a step or two beyond a popcorn romp. This is a thrilling film, but I never truly found it scary. 

Regardless, RESIDENT EVIL cements Cregger as an event filmmaker with a truly modern sense of what audiences look for in horror. While I still remain unconvinced that video games will ever blossom into consistent source material for meaningful cinema, Cregger’s love and devotion to this property translates it into something that is both artful and unpretentious. This is going to blow the collective minds of every teenager with an appetite for the morbid who manages to sneak into it this weekend. Some of those people will eventually become filmmakers who will cite it as their favorite Cregger film regardless of how high he flies from here. That’s what it’s all about. Meanwhile, as someone who has always struggled to complete these games due to their demanding combat and labyrinthian puzzles, I’m grateful that I can now rely on Bryan whenever I need that fix.