One of the many splendid things about Zach Cregger’s “Weapons” is that it was a horror film made with humanity. It overflowed with majestic creepiness, but all the witchy stolen-child stuff was folded into emotionally suspenseful situations that Cregger interwove like a junior “Pulp Fiction.” (That’s part of why Amy Madigan’s evil crone had such nightmare resonance.)
When a movie becomes as big a sleeper sensation as “Weapons” did, the director who made it can write his own ticket. So when Cregger announced that his next movie would be a reboot of “Resident Evil,” I thought, “Really?” My reaction was: How utterly of this day and age to follow up a movie as remarkable as “Weapons” with a reboot of the most inhumane horror series of the last 25 years.
There have been seven “Resident Evil” films (including the 2021 reboot), and obviously they come with a major fan base, but please! Without exception, they have been hyperviolent, hyperkinetic video-game zombie sludge, designed as depersonalized thrill rides for gamers (or just numb horror junkies). I thought: This is what Cregger wants to do? But then I got over myself and said: Okay, fair enough, he grew up with the games and loves them, and he wants to take that sort of follow-up pressure off himself. He wants to unwind and make a piece of unabashed monster pulp that’s close to his childhood heart. But what would a Zach Cregger “Resident Evil” movie look like?
Now we know. His new “Resident Evil” is different, and much better, than the other “Resident Evil” movies — it’s a creepy-crawly squishfest that takes its time and has a weird innocence about it. (At moments it reminded me of “Planet Terror.”) Cregger doesn’t stage it in the usual “relentless” video-game-movie style. He works in a more ambling and naturalistic way, and that’s there from the opening shot, as the camera follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier, into the hospital where he’s dropping off a vital organ, and he’s then handed another, even more important Schedule A package (he presumes that it’s a human heart, or something of that magnitude) to take to a hospital up in the mountains.
Austin Abrams, who played the homeless drug addict in “Weapons,” here seems a different actor. (That’s how good he is.) With tousled hair and a cutely abashed and fearful manner, he’s got the look and aura of an indie rocker from the 2000s like Mark Foster, but he also has a touch of the young Sam Rockwell about him. His Bryan is a winningly ordinary hero, not macho at all (there are moments he squeals in terror), and he’s basically on his own. That’s what makes this a video-game movie — not the tone, but the way that Bryan wanders from one increasingly outlandish danger zone to the next. “Resident Evil” is a light and funky viral beastie thriller.
Is it a good movie? Let’s call it a sweetly executed piece of escapist trivia. It’s got a quirky relatability…for a “Resident Evil” movie. Bryan, without chains on his tires, drives up a treacherous farm-country road in the snowy night, which lends the movie a fairy-tale atmosphere. Cregger plants a “human” angle by involving Bryan in a cell-phone argument with his girlfriend, who is pregnant. She wants to know what he wants to do. (He tells her that it’s her body and her choice, which is not the answer she wants to hear.)
This gives us a trace of investment in Bryan, but it’s also the film’s way of softening us for the kill. Driving along on the skittery snow, Bryan hits a woman who has darted out into the middle of the road, and she’s our first zombie: a bit older than we expect, with jagged blood streaks on her face. He winds up saving her and stashing her in the passenger seat, until he’s stopped by a cop.
Moments later, he’s trekking across a meadow to a seemingly empty farmhouse, and this is the first of the film’s episodic “environments,” though the way Cregger stages it we don’t feel like we’re trapped in a game. It’s more like a slowly evolving funhouse. Bryan gets attacked by a dog, who pokes its head through a barn wall…and then the dog’s face splits apart like a flower, with tentacles shooting out. That effect will remind anyone who has seen it of John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” one of several horror films “Resident Evil” borrows from. The tentacles keep coming, and the zombies have a way of using them to glom onto victims, which they absorb into multi-limbed globs that roll like tumbleweeds, an effect evocative of the 1989 body-horror cult movie “Society.” In an elevator shaft, one of the monsters vomits green acid that burns through the floor like the alien blood in “Alien.”
Bryan is a hilarious amateur when it comes to using a gun, and he possesses no overtly heroic movie qualities. He’s just our shambling representative, trying to survive whatever gets thrown at him. What’s fun about “Resident Evil” is the way that this keeps developing. It’s not just a gnashing-zombie movie. The monsters, though they grow out of the same virus, are all different, and Cregger wants you to gawk at them with the same arrested awe he has.
Bryan has a run-in with Carl (Paul Walter Hauser), a scientist who works for the Umbrella Corporation (the closest the movie comes to official “Resident Evil” world-building), and Hauser is amusingly overwrought — until the tentacles come for him. When Bryan finally lands in the Umbrella laboratory, where they’re ready to use the package he was carrying to create an antidote, we’re reassured to be in this pristine white space, full of scientists in lab coats, led by Dave (Zach Cherry), who look like they’re ready to save the day. But it doesn’t quite work out that way. “Resident Evil” is a lark, a monster mash, a shape-shifting throwaway. As a horror film, it makes “Weapons” look like “War and Peace,” but it escalates over 90 minutes into a kind of symphonic loopiness. It refuses to take itself seriously, but unlike the other “Resident Evil” movies…it’s alive.
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