[COLUMN] In Zack Cregger's Resident Evil, Nobody Survives Alone | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This essay discusses the plot of Zack Cregger’s Resident Evil, which is in theatres this weekend including the ending. If you’re looking for a capsule review: it’s a really great time at the pictures, and it plays incredibly well with an audience. It’s a fun, well-made horror movie with a great sense of humour and a really impressive lead performance. So be aware of that before continuing on. With that in mind, let’s sink our teeth into it.

In Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil, hell is other people.

Not simply in the abstract sense that Jean-Paul Satre meant, but in a very literal and direct sort of way. Adapting the hit video game to screen, Cregger’s Resident Evil is an endearingly literal and direct sort of movie. So much of the film is about taking the anxieties gnawing away at medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) and manifesting them in a very tangible and gnarly sort of way. It is about a viral outbreak tearing through an American city, but it’s also about Bryan’s nightmares come to life.

The film opens mid-conversation, with Bryan dropping off his latest order at a busy hospital as he takes a phone call from his girlfriend Michelle (Molly Daisy). Michelle has just taken a pregnancy test and it has come back positive, which obviously poses a very real question about the couple’s future together. Bryan stumbles clumsily through a variety of noncommittal answers – maybe the test is a false positive, it’s Michelle’s body so it is her choice – to avoid actually engaging with the reality of what is happening.

Though Michelle pleads with Bryan to come home so that the couple can actually talk through the situation, Bryan opts instead to take another courier assignment from the hospital. There is a very obvious financial incentive here – “it’s outside the zone, so it pays double” – but it also feels like, on some level, Bryan is relieved to be able to delay or forestall the inevitable conversation with Michella about their future as a couple and as a family unit.

Of course, Resident Evil is a horror movie. So, inevitably, Bryan’s courier run winds up proving anything but mundane. Part of the charm of Cregger’s take on Resident Evil is that it is – in contrast to the twisty narratives of his two previous films, Barbarian and Weapons – aggressively linear. Bryan must keep pressing forward through the movie. There are no flashback sequences. The inevitable exposition dump is delivered by Umbrella executive Paul (Paul Walter Hauser) in a moving car.

In some ways, this feels like Cregger adopting the language of a video game. Resident Evil pays a lot of attention to Bryan’s linear progress. In the first half, as he advances across snowy terrain, shots are framed to draw attention to his progression; landmarks from earlier sequences and set pieces, like a crashed cop car or a barn, are visible in the background as he advances to the next stage of his journey. At the climax, Bryan’s progress is literally mapped as he moves up the levels of a tower.

Bryan’s descent into hell begins when he strikes a wandering figure (Andrea Miltnerová) on a snowy road. He does not flee the scene of the accident, instead loading the strange woman into his car and trying to drive her to the hospital, along with the package that he is couriering. Bryan is pulled over by a cop (Johnno Wilson), who takes the woman into his car. That car crashes, and Bryan once again gets out to render assistance, finding himself trapped in a nightmare.

The woman inevitably turns into a feral attacker, forcing Bryan to shoot her using the gun taken from the cop’s dead body. In doing so, Bryan accidentally shoots out the engine block of his own car. So he wanders to a nearby farmstead. After an encounter with a dog in a barn, he makes his way into the house. The house is very evocative of rural Americana. Everything is rustic and wholesome. There are strange signs of violence, but the family home is eerily empty.

Scared and panicked, Bryan desperately tries to reach the authorities. When that fails, he calls Michelle, getting her voicemail. There is a sense, in this small family home, of perhaps the life that he and Michelle might have together. It is perhaps the life that Bryan is so afraid of. This is around the point that Bryan’s anxieties begin to truly manifest in flesh and blood and tendon, in which the horrors infecting Raccoon City become unnervingly personal.

This is another adaptational choice from Cregger that proves very adept. Cregger largely decides to bypass the lore and the back story of Resident Evil. Unlike Paul W.S. Anderson’s earlier adaptations of the games, there is never a sense that Cregger is particularly interested in building out a “world” or a “mythology” of this horror premise. Cregger is much more interested in the subjective experience of it. He has talked about trying to replicate the feeling of playing the game.

So the horrors start to take on a weirdly personal resonance for Bryan. Bryan is attacked by an infected old man who lived on the property, and seemingly kills him by shooting him in the head. However, the pedestrian from the car is also not dead. She charges the house, and Bryan kills her with a shotgun blast to the face. However, these two bodies do not stay dead. Eerie, creepy tendrils emerge from the dead woman’s neck, latching on to the dead man, pulling the bodies together.

As this is happening, Michelle has called back on the farmhouse phone. This sequence of two bodies being pulled and meshed together is juxtaposed with Michelle’s plea into the house’s answering machine for Bryan to come home, so that they can figure things out together. It is a really great example of the way that horror can make subtext literal. What seems to be Bryan’s worst fear – actually being a part of something with Michelle – is made manifest right before his eyes.

The weird gestalt creature from the farmhouse ends up chasing Bryan across the movie. It seems to have latched on to Bryan, imprinted upon him. It follows him through the woods, into the city, through the hospital. No matter how hard Bryan or other characters might try to scare it away or harm it, the entity will not be dissuaded by bullets or stomach acid. It wants Bryan, presumably so that it might fold him into itself, so it might consume him and make him one with it.

This creature is far from the only manifestation of Bryan’s internal anxieties that finds expression over the course of the night. Wandering from the farm house towards the city, Bryan finds a tunnel. In that tunnel, he finds a crashed recreational vehicle, another family home rendered monstrous by some unseen act of violence. Bryan has to pass through the crashed vehicle to get through the tunnel, and inside he finds a young girl who has been abandoned by her parents.

This is a very literal reflection of Bryan’s own parental anxieties, turbo-charged by Michelle’s phone call at the start of the film. The young girl has been infected, her foot transforming into those same tendrils and tentacles that came from the dead body at the farm. Bryan reaches out to pick her up and carry her to safety, but those tendrils reach back – another manifestation of Bryan’s fear of being swallowed by his responsibility to others. He panics and runs.

When the girl attacks, Bryan shoots her at close range with the shotgun, splattering her across the inside of the vehicle. As with so much of what happens over the course of the movie, Bryan picks himself up and continues on his way, trying to convince himself that what is happening is not real and that he did not actually do what he just did. There is a sense that Bryan thinks he is inside some strange nightmare – and perhaps he is, one tailormade just for him.

These familial and parental anxieties simmer through the film. In the sewers, Bryan encounters a very large and very bald man with pale skin, sitting perfectly still. It looks like a giant monstrous baby. The scene is interrupted when the man’s stomach explodes in a grotesque parody of birth, an army of infected rats spewing forth. It is perhaps a questionable, but thematically loaded, design choice that when Bryan reaches the hospital, he has to pass through the infected maternity ward.

There is something very effective in how Resident Evil expresses this personal anxiety through body horror. Of course, birth has a long history of finding expression through the grotesque. The entire Alien franchise is built around it. And there are certainly shades of David Lynch’s Eraserhead to Cregger’s Resident Evil, to reference another movie that manifests paternal anxieties through surreal and unsettling horror. This is a large part of the charm of horror, finding a way to express these sorts of personal fears in a very overt and direct manner, so that they might be confronted and explored.

Of course, this is not the only fear sublimated into Cregger’s Resident Evil. There are shades of contemporary millennial horror that bleed in. While it is not a liminal horror of itself, the film feels of a piece with recent horrors like Exit 8 in its story of a young man struggling with whether he’s ready to become a father and It Ends in its narrative emphasis on following a road despite not knowing where it will take the protagonist.

There are also rather overt shades of the warped memory of 9/11 in a sequence where the infected just throw themselves off roofs, splattering onto the ground, in the shadow of Racoon City Hospital, a burning building that consists of two towers looming over the city. Still, the film is most tightly focused on Bryan’s anxiety over Michelle’s pregnancy, to the point that the journey becomes something of a pregnancy metaphor.

“I’m carrying a life here,” he insists at one point, referring to the sealed medical pouch that accompanies him on this journey. Even before he knows the significance of what is inside, a key ingredient for the cure to what is infecting the city, he never considers abandoning it. The pouch is itself likened to a baby. The doctor (Emily Piggford) who gives it to him has to warn him to be careful with it. “It’s not a pizza,” she chides him.

There is a really grim and bleak climax to all of this. Though he eventually admits his love for Michelle and his wish – despite his fear – that he might be able to form a family unit with her and their child, Cregger’s film delivers a rather nasty twist. Bryan had been bitten by the young girl in the recreational vehicle, and so is infected with the agent transforming the city. His courier mission to the hospital, carrying a key component of a potential antidote, becomes life or death for him.

Ultimately, Bryan gets the ingredient for the cure to the hospital just in time. He takes it into the laboratory, but disaster strikes. Bryan is transformed into a monster. In the chaos, the antidote is lost.  In an extended sequence, Bryan becomes another of those amalgamated monsters, swallowing the laboratory staff and folding them into himself. It is a really great horror movie ending, where the protagonist actually gets what they want, but in the most horrifying manner possible.

So much of Bryan’s journey over the course of Resident Evil is learning that – despite his fears and anxieties over surrendering part of himself – he does actually want to be part of a family unit with other people. And, in its own deeply twisted way, the movie lets him. It’s a delightfully bleak ending.