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Alfred Hitchcock once mused surprise is a bomb going off beneath a table that neither the characters nor the audience knows is there. Suspense is the public knowing about the bomb whilst the characters sit blissfully unaware.
Zach Cregger knows about suspense as much or more as he does a well-timed jump scare. The wunderkind genre filmmaker—who became the toast of midnight madness festivals after the demented Barbarian, and improbably Oscar voters via the political allegory film he claims is only coincidentally incendiary, Weapons—appreciates that you remember and most likely care about Resident Evil. Many of us have played at least a few of the survival horror Capcom staples of the 1990s and 2000s; or saw the once popular (albeit uniformly awful) Paul W.S. Anderson movies back at the day. Hell, even the uninitiated at least caught how a zombie movie works at some point.
So we are invited to intuitively recognize well before the hapless medical courier played by Austin Abrams that this kid absolutely should not be stopping his car to check on that stranger who jumped out in front of the vehicle on a snowy night; we certainly know better than to invite her into the passenger seat; and like hell we’d be caught driving her ever closer to a place called Raccoon City!
But Abrams’ Bryan knows none of these things; he’s never played Resident Evil. More’s the pity for him since at least the first act or two of this movie derives most of its pleasure, tension, and even carefully baked gallows humor from appreciating ahead of time how screwed this poor bastard is. And Cregger is at his best when he is playing it, if not exactly straight, then with a bloodthirsty twinkle. While never straying fully into Edgar Wright/Shaun of the Dead territory, Cregger and the movie delights in the shudder that goes down a viewer’s spine when a dog barks in the distance, or poor, poor Bryan sees he only has four bullets in a gun he barely knows how to aim.
Not that I imagine all gamers will savor the filmmaker’s instincts. The highest compliment I can give the movie is that during this earlier half of the picture, Cregger elicits for the first time in live-action the atmosphere of the video games. It’s a curious thing since not a single character in the film has appeared in the games, and indeed more than a few monsters will do things gamers have never seen before. But the constant sense of helpless doom and giggle-inducing anxiety that comes when Bryan warily aims his flashlight around a dark corner does a better job of adapting the spirit of Resident Evil than a million easter egg callbacks or slices of fan service cosplaying outfits.
The premise certainly feels like it could be one of the background stories Leon S. Kennedy or Jill Valentine found written down in an abandoned police station’s journal (if you know, you know). If they did, they’d see a tale about a chap named Bryan, who is at the end of his shift in a small town Colorado hospital when he is offered double for delivering a mystery, life-saving package to Raccoon City General Hospital. It also fortuitously comes on a night he is dreading going home because his girlfriend Michelle has apparently just told him she’s pregnant. He responded by saying he’d support whatever decision she makes, and then high-tailing it out the door.
That of course turns out to be a mistake, even before the first zombie manifests. Still, those undead sure don’t make things better!
That is pretty much it for this fleet, and to be perfectly honest, slight movie. When, like the game, Cregger and his film go into pure survival mode, Resident Evil 2026 plays like gangbusters, lingering on the creepier emotions that multiplex horror can sometimes paper over—such as what it’s like to find an infected child who hasn’t turned yet and just wants a reassuring hug. But when it tries to use the same incidents to gesture toward some profundity about accepting parenthood, or worse half-baked genre subversion, the movie runs into a tonal disharmony that Barbarian and Weapons were able to avoid despite having far more complex narratives and ideas.
In truth, the movie is modeled after the games, which were in turn modeled after old drive-thru B-movies—less George Romero than his copycats that left the politics out but kept the zombies and gun action. Cregger’s movie has plenty of both, albeit perhaps more of a Resident Evil 4 variety than ‘90s-only gamers might remember. He also structures this around an everyman who must unravel the layers of Umbrella’s Raccoon City shenanigans until he is standing inevitably in a futuristic lab where everything has gone to hell.
Nonetheless, there is a shallowness to the work that might disappoint those wanting more meat on the zombie-gnawed bone after Weapons, and there s also a bold swing of a finale that simultaneously honors the games from a skewed angle while failing to serve its own tone or the thin story that Cregger blazes through like he’s on easy mode. The final twists are definitely amusing, but their implications belie just how empty the whole enterprise is once you get past those stellar graphics.
Nonetheless, I cannot deny it’s the best Resident Evil movie ever made. So much so, it probably deserves better than that faintest of faint praise. There are sequences, such as when Bryan must run through an American city and evade a sight that is the true stuff of nightmares 20 years ago, that will launch a thousand think pieces and thrice as many memes. Another set piece where Bryan has picked up, like the viewer, on the fact he’s in a horror game as a creature tries to lure him into a dark room is similarly sublime.
The movie is a blast, but perhaps more in the end like one of those Dead Shot arcade rail-shooters that Capcom still makes sometimes on the side with Bandai. It eats your quarters and whizzes by with a smile on its face. But the next day when you’re asked to describe what it is… you just remember the relentless motion of moving forward and wishing the character would look over their shoulder.
Resident Evil is in theaters Friday, Sept. 18.
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