Not being a fan of video games, gore, or jolts administered by the sudden appearance of reanimated corpses, I did not particularly wish to review the new movie Resident Evil, but since I had already written about the other movies occupying the top five at the box office last weekend, when the video game adaptation premiered at No. 1, I felt I had no choice.
Having spilt ink on Practical Magic 2, Spider-Man: Brand New Day, The Odyssey, and my beloved Coyote vs. Acme, I reckoned that I was obliged to see the movie on which members of the public had collectively shelled out more than $60 million that opening weekend.
That I was bracing for something grisly — I refer not to its genre but to my assumptions about its quality — should not imply that I am utterly unable to appreciate horror movies generally or zombie movies especially. To the contrary, I pay annual visits, usually around Halloween, to the shadow-bedecked netherworld of Jacques Tourneur’s ineffably atmospheric I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and I acknowledge freely that George A. Romero’s great Living Dead series (1968-2009) puts the notion of widespread walking cadavers to good satirical use.
Resident Evil, though, is something else — a video game franchise that means to generate excitement through the offing of zombies and other hideous creatures. No thanks. Plus, this has always seemed to me a singularly flimsy pretext for a movie notwithstanding the fact that it has birthed a movie empire: the original Resident Evil (2002), the many sequels with colons after their titles and ominous nouns after the colons (Apocalypse, Extinction, Afterlife, etc.). I admit I skipped the delightful-sounding Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City (2021).
Yet I do not altogether regret buying a ticket for director and cowriter Zach Cregger’s new Resident Evil, which, in a startling shock effect, turns out to have some kinship with both Tourneur’s taste for unobtrusive effects and Romero’s penchant for sociological wit. Like so many modern movies, by the time this one concluded, a fair number of my senses had been battered, but for the first 45 minutes or so, I found myself pleasantly surprised — pleasantly surprised in the way one is when one expects a root canal and is instead given a mere filling.
Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a gig worker-type who looks as though he would be driving for Amazon or Uber were he not ferrying organs earmarked for transplants from one hospital to the next. We first encounter him in a Steadicam shot from behind — one of many such Kubrickian shots — as he snakes his way through a hospital trying to find the appropriate person with whom to deposit his latest delivery on a bitter-cold winter night. Before he can return to his girlfriend at home, Bryan is prevailed upon to make a further delivery — this time, some sort of priority package that he takes to be a heart for a small child or something similar. The destination? A hospital in Raccoon City. Uh-oh.
There follows a genuinely persuasive piece of cinematic suspense: Driving in an ill-equipped car on a lonely, icy road cutting through a forest, Bryan is unable to avoid hitting a woman who emerges out of the surrounding woods. We feel his anguish as he exits his vehicle — and his seemingly peaceable existence — to locate her body and offer assistance, but we know something is amiss when he can find no trace of it other than footsteps leading back into the forest. Spoiler alert: The car crash is not what has killed this woman, who is animate but, um, already dead.
Yes, this woman is a zombie — specifically, among those infected by an ill-defined but apocalyptically awful virus that (in shades of the COVID-19 pandemic) seems to have made its way into the general public from a lab. The virus induces, among other things, deceased people to survive innumerable bullet wounds and other injuries, and to later develop tentacles with which to consume those healthy people whom they encounter. For obvious reasons, I am in no position to state whether this condition is further explicated in any of the Resident Evil video games.
Despite the grossness of the concept, the image of Bryan trekking through the woods to locate the woman he has struck is haunting, and the sight of him inviting her into his car so she can get looked over at the hospital — even putting a seatbelt on her, as if courtliness will offset his reckless driving — is comical in a macabre sort of way. When she finally does go on the attack — first killing a sheriff who had stopped them, then going after Bryan himself — it is genuinely startling. The film is also ruthlessly efficient in throwing up stumbling blocks for Bryan, many of them quite basic: Having apparently outrun the “dead” woman, his eyes focus on a farmhouse in which to take refuge, but he first must get past an electrified fence … and then a vicious dog … and then a barn with no easy exit … and then the undead within the farmhouse. There’s a cleanness and clarity to the direction here. Abrams is quite appealing as Bryan, who is flying solo for most of the movie and therefore narrates to himself the various twists and turns. “Oh man,” he might say, or: “What am I doing out here?” (There are a few engaging supporting turns, including by Paul Walter Hauser and Kali Reis.)
‘PRACTICAL MAGIC 2’ IS A VERY SILLY SEQUEL
And what am I doing watching this movie and saying kindly things about it? Well, it held my attention for longer than I imagined, and it even expressed a covertly conservative moral vision, albeit fleetingly: It was admirable how quickly a geeky millennial like Bryan recognized the necessity of self-defense — it did not take him long to equip himself with guns and ammunition — and it was even more admirable when Bryan, having previously encouraged his pregnant girlfriend to consider an abortion, reconsiders that grave sin when confronted with his own mortality. This counts as a vibe shift.
Of course, Resident Evil cannot sustain such subtler moments forever, and the movie ends with Bryan at last unloading that package — which actually contains some sort of vial essential for the creation of an antidote — to a hospital whose very infrastructure is being consumed by acid-emitting zombies. If only Cregger had realized that the strength of his movie, such as it is, is in evoking the simple foreboding that accompanies walking into an empty farmhouse on a blustery night and not seeing a living soul.
Peter Tonguette is the Life & Arts editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.