The recent spate of video game adaptations have so far failed to capture a crucial aspect of the medium: the experience is determined entirely by the player. And sometimes the player is really, really crap at the game.
It’s a tonal quirk that makes Zach Cregger’s reboot of Capcom’s blockbuster game series Resident Evil a funny, delirious symphony of cartwheeling, flesh-and-bones zorbing balls and exploding blood bubbles for the non-gamers, and a pointed meta-comedy for the gamers about how everyone thinks they’re a zombie executioner extraordinaire until they miss five consecutive headshots and then somehow die to a rat.
It’s far more faithful to the survival horror mechanics of its source than the earlier Milla Jovovich-led films, yet isn’t suffocated by fan service like the flop 2021 reboot Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. More importantly, it feels thoroughly like a film by Zach Cregger, as skilled in its momentum as Barbarian (2022) and last year’s Oscar-winner Weapons, proving that subtle, psychological work isn’t always the superior horror when you have a filmmaker who can deliver a jump scare shock with this much elegant panache.
Weapons’s Austin Abrams here plays Bryan, a medical courier about to clock out and head home to figure out his future in the wake of an unplanned pregnancy. He’s offered a job for double the pay, if only he’ll drive up the mountains to Raccoon City General Hospital and deliver a high-priority package. Life, he decides, can wait. Out on the road, in the snowy dark, he hits a woman with his vehicle whom he believes to be in extreme shock.
Of course, that’s not the case. She’s chock-full of the T-virus, which turns its hosts into disgusting, ravenous mutants. So far, so Resident Evil. Only, Bryan isn’t quite the expected everyman who rises heroically up to the occasion. Bryan is the guy being controlled by someone who just picked up the game. He sprints around in little Scooby Doo-style circles while being chased. He fails repeatedly to open locked doors. He tosses away items he’ll need later. When faced with an electric fence, you get the sense this is where the game would throw up the tutorial prompt, “press x to jump”.
It’s to Abrams’s real credit that Bryan remains comedically frustrating as opposed to an outright irritation. He’s likeable with a small, tragic streak, though Cregger only once oversteps the film’s meta qualities by having him confirm out loud that he’s a gamer whose combat skillset is entirely virtual. Elsewhere, he subtly replicates the narrative flow of a Resident Evil game by allowing his camera to scan new locations, so that the audience always learns new information in tandem with Bryan, with occasional switches to a more direct, first-person view.
That’s the bread-and-butter part of the adaptation. But Cregger and his co-writer Shay Hatten are interested too in the more niche, and sometimes sillier, aspects of video games, from the way their location-to-location-based narratives instil an instant sense of dread when Bryan realises the only path forward is through the maternity ward (well, nothing good is going to happen in there, is it?) to a scene where ever-reliable Paul Walter Hauser crops up to deliver crucial mission information from the front seat of a car while Bryan is driven between locations.
Resident Evil, then, is about as faithful as can be to the experience of sitting down to actually play one of these games. Unless you’re a god with a controller, it’s a strange, delightful concoction of sublime ridiculousness, dangerously elevated cortisol levels, and the ever-escalating fear you’re about to come face with the most disgusting sentient meat patty your mind could ever conjure. For Cregger, I imagine, that counts as mission completed.
Dir: Zach Cregger. Starring: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser. Cert 15, 90 minutes
‘Resident Evil’ is in cinemas from 18 September
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