★★★★☆ — 4/5
There is a stretch during the first half of Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil where I genuinely thought I might be watching a five-star movie.
Not a five-star Resident Evil movie.
A five-star horror movie.
Because for nearly half its runtime, Cregger gets damn near everything right.
The atmosphere. The pacing. The little splashes of humor. The creeping dread. Even when the film moves outdoors, Cregger and his camera somehow make these wide-open spaces feel suffocatingly claustrophobic. There’s an oppressive quality hanging over everything, as though the walls of some invisible corridor are constantly closing in around our protagonist.
Even the exterior sequences in Resident Evil manage to feel remarkably claustrophobic.
And then there’s the house.
Without getting too deeply into spoiler territory, the sequence inside the house is simply expertly constructed. Cregger understands how to use space, movement and the camera itself to put us inside a scene rather than merely allowing us to observe it.
The POV moments scattered throughout the movie only reinforce that feeling.
It reminded me of one of the things Cregger did so effectively in Weapons: he knows how to make the camera part of the ride.
But here, there’s another layer to it.
At times, Resident Evil actually feels like playing Resident Evil for the first time.
The Right Kind of Hero
A huge part of that comes down to Austin Abrams as Bryan. Sony describes Bryan as a medical courier who gets caught in a single night that rapidly collapses into chaos.
And that choice is important.
Bryan isn’t a Green Beret. He isn’t a battle-hardened cop. He isn’t some impossibly capable special-operations badass who conveniently knows exactly what to do when everything goes to hell.
He’s a medical courier.
He’s just some guy having an exceptionally shitty night.
And Abrams is fantastic at selling that.
There is an everyman quality to his performance that makes the escalating insanity around him considerably more effective. Bryan is frightened, confused and frequently in over his head. Sometimes he’s funny simply because watching an ordinary human being attempt to process the increasingly impossible situation around him is inherently funny.
More importantly, though, the movie doesn’t need to stop being scary for Bryan to be funny.
That’s an important distinction.
It’s also why I have such a problem with one particular sequence later in the movie.
And Then He Gets in the Car…
There’s a point where Bryan gets into a car with an Umbrella agent.
And for about five minutes, I wondered what the hell happened to the movie I had been watching.
I’m sure this sequence is going to work wonderfully for some people. I’ve already seen the argument that the comedy provides a necessary release valve after so much sustained tension. And normally I’d agree.
But this wasn’t a release valve for me.
It felt like somebody briefly changed the channel.
Suddenly, the carefully calibrated humor that had worked so well because it emerged naturally from Bryan and his circumstances becomes much broader and much more overt. The entire rhythm of the movie changes.
For those few minutes, Resident Evil starts feeling less like survival horror and more like an SNL sketch wandered onto the wrong soundstage.
Cregger, of course, came out of sketch comedy, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with this kind of humor. In another movie, the exact same scene might absolutely kill.
Here?
It brought the movie to a screeching halt.
And that’s particularly frustrating because Cregger had already found the perfect source of comedy: Bryan himself.
The character’s bumbling humanity gives us all the relief we need. We can laugh at the absurdity of what is happening without the movie having to announce that it’s time for the funny part.
Had Cregger played that sequence straighter—or had a slightly heavier hand in the editing room trimmed it down—I honestly think I might be talking about a five-star film.
Because fortunately, Resident Evil eventually remembers what it was doing.
And when it gets back on track?
Holy shit.
Resident Evil Gets Weird
The latter half of the movie takes some wonderfully bizarre chances.
Cregger isn’t afraid to get gross. He isn’t afraid to get strange. And some of the creature work and effects push the movie into exactly the sort of disgusting territory this franchise should occasionally inhabit.
This isn’t a filmmaker timidly protecting a valuable IP.
He’s playing with it.
Longtime Resident Evil fans will also find plenty of Easter eggs and recognizable elements scattered throughout, but refreshingly, the movie doesn’t feel enslaved to them. Cregger isn’t simply marching familiar characters and objects past the camera waiting for the audience to applaud because they recognize something.
In fact, there are stretches where this barely feels like the Resident Evil we already know.
And I think that’s a good thing.
We’ve had plenty of Resident Evil movies trying to recreate, reinterpret or remix things we’ve already seen. Cregger instead seems interested in asking what other stories could happen inside this universe.
The result feels less like another adaptation and more like the world of Resident Evil suddenly got bigger.
Most importantly, though, Cregger seems to understand something that filmmakers adapting video games frequently miss:
Sometimes capturing how a game feels is more important than recreating what happens in it.
There are moments here that recreate that sensation of entering an unfamiliar room, knowing something is wrong, having absolutely no idea what’s waiting around the corner and desperately wishing you had more ammunition.
That’s Resident Evil.
And putting an ordinary guy like Bryan in the middle of it makes that sensation considerably stronger.
Watch the Resident Evil Trailer
And if you haven’t seen it yet, Sony’s official trailer gives you a pretty good taste of the particular brand of hell Bryan is walking into.
Final Thoughts
For much of its runtime, Resident Evil is atmospheric, claustrophobic, beautifully photographed, genuinely creepy and occasionally disgusting as hell. Austin Abrams gives the movie exactly the vulnerable everyman protagonist it needs, while Cregger once again demonstrates that he has an exceptional ability to use the camera to physically pull an audience through a horror story.
I just wish he had trusted that horror a little more.
Because somewhere inside this four-star movie is the five-star version I was watching during its nearly flawless first half.
Still, if this is where cinematic Resident Evil is headed next?
I’m absolutely along for the ride.
★★★★☆ — 4/5
Highly recommended.
And if you absolutely need to use the bathroom?
Wait until Bryan gets in the car with the Umbrella agent.
