[COLUMN] Zach Cregger's Resident Evil Is Refreshingly Mean | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Resident Evil, including the ending. It’s great though. I really enjoyed it, as evidenced by the fact that I seemingly cannot stop thinking about it.

There is an appealing nastiness to Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil movie, at least by the standards of mainstream studio horror franchises.

To be fair, the film is not an endurance sport in the same way that the subgenre known as “torture porn” might claim to be. Cregger’s Resident Evil is never as grimy or as unpleasant as something like Saw III.  However, there is a certain sort of nastiness to the film that has come to feel a little unusual within the framework of a major franchise horror film. It is not sadism or depravity, but it gives the movie just a little bit more edge than most of its contemporaries.

Resident Evil largely focuses on a medical courier named Bryan (Austin Abrams), who is dispatched with a package to Raccoon City. Inevitably, the character finds himself in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. It is a fun and kinetic movie, and critics like Adam Nayman have rushed to contrast Cregger’s in-your-face pacing and rhythm with the aesthetics of “elevated horror” that have come to dominate so much of the modern genre.

This is not to suggest that the film lacks depth. Resident Evil is a thematically consistent horror movie, a story about a young man grappling with his anxieties about becoming a father and being swallowed by a family unit, something Cregger has openly talked about. However, Cregger prioritizes the visceral sensation of the movie, including the embrace of video game language into his storytelling. Cregger wants to make a horror movie that will draw a reaction from an audience. He succeeds.

Without ever insisting upon itself, without drawing attention to itself, without patting itself on the back, one of the most oddly compelling aspects of Resident Evil is the way in which Cregger slaughters so many of the sacred cows of this sort of mainstream filmmaking. For example, roughly twenty minutes into the film, Bryan kills a dog. That is one of those inviolable rules of mainstream filmmaking – even horror filmmaking – and Resident Evil does it without batting an eyelid.

A few minutes later, investigating a crashed recreational vehicle, Bryan finds a lonely little girl (Isla McRae) crying in the toilet. She has been bitten and infected. While Bryan tries to help her, her infected foot tries to attack him. She transforms into a zombie and Bryan blasts her with a shotgun, splattering her across the back wall of the recreation vehicle in a sequence that is portrayed as remarkably matter-of-fact. Bryan just shuffles on his way. “I didn’t do that,” he mutters to himself leaving the vehicle, in shock. “I love kids.”

At the climax of the movie, ferrying a key ingredient of the cure to a secret laboratory at the top of the hospital, Bryan has to journey through a maternity ward. The babies there have already been infected and transformed – itself a violation of another norm of mainstream studio filmmaking. When he accidentally “pops” a birthing pod, a monstrous baby peers out over its crib at him. Bryan responds, quite abruptly, by just smashing the baby’s head with a mop he’d picked up outside.

To be fair, it’s worth acknowledging that these kills are not transgressive for the sake of being transgressive. They fit with the themes of the film. Bryan is destroying the family that he is afraid to have. At one point, in the hospital car park, Bryan looks at a doodle on the back of a parked car: a happy couple, their daughter, their baby and dog. In true video game fashion, that is an itemized list of the people that Bryan has killed that evening. He is killing the very idea of a family.

These beats would be remarkable on their own, but they sit within a larger nastiness in the framing of the story. Bryan’s misadventures begin when, driving to Raccoon City, he accidentally crashes into a wandering pedestrian (Andrea Miltnerová). It’s a snowy road. It’s dark out. There is nobody around. In most horror movies, Bryan would make a panicked decision in the moment to drive on and leave the body, a hit-and-run. The rest of the movie would feel like punishment for that.

This is the logic of “transgression”, and it is the cornerstone of classic horror, the morality that underpins the carnage. The violence inflicted on the characters in these films is often justified as a sort of moral reckoning for some perceived failure – often as simple as having sex. Movies like Thinner and I Know What You Did Last Summer are built around the karmic suffering of protagonists who killed people in hit-and-run accidents instead of taking responsibility.

However, Bryan doesn’t do that. Bryan doesn’t leave the woman abandoned in the snow to die. Bryan pulls over the car. He ventures into the woods to find her. He picks her up and puts her in his car. Bryan unequivocally does the right thing here, and the rest of the movie punishes him for it. Later on, with the infected girl, Bryan also tries to do the right thing. He tries to reassure her. He tries to pick her up. For his trouble, he gets bitten and infected.

To be fair, this logic doesn’t only apply to Bryan. At one point, Bryan is being ferried into Raccoon City by the hypercompetent Maxine (Kali Reis), a ruthlessly efficient killing machine. However, that journey is derailed when the car comes across a young woman being chased by a bunch of infected. Maxine stops the car, gets out, and tries to save the girl and kill the infected. This small act of altruism results in Maxine's death and the further derailment of Bryan’s evening.

Indeed, the closest that Bryan comes to “transgressing” – to doing something wrong so that the film can justify punishing him – is faking the signature of an intake nurse (Jo Martin) for an organ that he delivered, rather than just waiting around for hours. It is a harmless, victimless crime. But no sooner as Bryan finished spelling her name on the paper than another doctor (Emily Piggford) grabs him and issues him instructions to travel to Raccoon City. It is one of the film’s bleaker jokes.

And the punchline is on Bryan. Resident Evil ends with Bryan infected and transformed, turned into a version of the monster that had been stalking him for most of the movie, an amalgam of different people stitched together into a single organism – a literal manifestation of his fear of becoming part of the family unit. It’s rare for a studio horror movie to end with the protagonist dying at the end, even rarer for them to be transformed into a monster, with the final sequence shot like King Kong.

It is a provocative ending on a number of levels. Most obviously, the audience likes Bryan. Austin Abrams gives an incredibly charismatic performance as the character, and Cregger works very hard to ensure that the audience is always aligned with him. Indeed, part of this likability derives from the fact that Bryan is a genuinely decent guy who is consistently punished for that decency. Sure, he’s struggling to communicate with his girlfriend (Sara Paxton), but he’s doing his best.

The other provocation is that, while not necessarily as bleakly nihilistic as the ending of Joker: Folie á Deux, this is effectively an ending that torches any idea of this film as the cornerstone of a conventional film franchise. There is no direct sequel to this. There are no surviving characters who can be spun-off into some ancillary media of some kind. It is an ending that feels very much like Zach Cregger dropping the mic. He’s left everything out on the field. There’s no encore coming.

This gets at what feels so refreshing about Resident Evil. While Resident Evil is not The Green Inferno or Martyrs or Irreversible or anything like that, it is rare for an enjoyable mainstream popcorn horror to commit so thoroughly to being so nasty. Much as the film’s visceral thrills and rollercoaster energy provide an interesting counterpoint to the self-conscious and self-serious aesthetics of what might be termed “metaphorror”, the film feels like a corrective to major studio horror franchises.

This is the era of “cultural fracking.” Any existing or recognizable brand with any cultural cachet whatsoever is going to be revived and resurrected, and sent to theatres. This includes horror franchises. And one of the great tensions of modern studio horror filmmaking is the push-and-pull between the genre’s need to be transgressive and upsetting and the need for this nostalgic content to be familiar and reassuring. So a lot of studio horror is reluctant to be provocative.

The Scream franchise is a great example of this. Since the recent reboot by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the franchise has felt strangely toothless. On the one hand, it is unwilling to let go of older stars like Neve Campbell or Courtney Cox, so these characters end up being untouchable. On the other hand, it is also reluctant to kill off younger stars like Jenna Ortega or Mason Gooding. So it winds up feeling bloodless, a slasher movie as cozy comfort viewing.

In contrast, despite its pedigree and its place in a vast intellectual property machine, Cregger’s Resident Evil never feels safe. One of the most tense sequences in the movie finds Bryan in a parked car with Umbrella executive Paul (Paul Walter Houser), trying to load a machine gun, looking for the safety. Throughout the sequence, Bryan absent-mindedly has the barrel of the gun pointed in Paul’s face, both men seemingly oblivious to the threat. It feels like the gun could go off at any second, taking Paul’s head with it. That is doesn’t is, at least on first watch, a major surprise.

That level of tension, particularly in an ostensibly low-stakes scene, is rare in a major studio horror, but it gets at the effectiveness of Cregger’s nastiness. It does feel, watching Resident Evil, like anything can happen. It never feels like the film is rigidly beholden to the structures or the conventions of a modern studio film. It is a trick that adds an extra layer of tension and suspense, even in a broadly comedic sequence and even in a very familiar intellectual property.

It is a small thing, but it’s a key part of why Resident Evil works as well at it does.