Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil begins with a man who does not want his life to change. Bryan is a medical courier, a man whose existence is defined by movement without necessarily having any direction. He drives things from one place to another. He delivers what other people need. He takes another job because it pays double. He is useful, but largely interchangeable. Then his girlfriend tells him she is pregnant, and suddenly the future has arrived without asking his permission. Cregger’s ingenious move is to turn that emotional paralysis into a survival-horror movie. By the time Bryan enters the nightmare of Raccoon City, he is already living inside a horror story of his own making. The monsters simply make it literal.

There is a tendency to discuss video-game adaptations according to how faithfully they reproduce characters, locations, mythology and iconography. Resident Evil takes a more interesting route. Cregger does not attempt to reproduce one particular game so much as reconstruct the experience of playing one. The film is an original story running parallel to the events of Resident Evil 2, but its architecture is unmistakably that of the games: locked doors, scarce resources, improvised weapons, bizarre obstacles, escalating objectives, seemingly useless objects, sudden encounters and the persistent feeling that somewhere just beyond the next corridor is something considerably worse. Cregger understands that Resident Evil is not necessarily about watching an action hero defeat monsters. It is about being the person who has to decide whether opening the next door is worth the risk.

The Rise of Zach Cregger

There is an intriguing progression through Zach Cregger’s work to this point. His emergence as a horror filmmaker was already something of a surprise given his background in sketch comedy with The Whitest Kids U’ Know, but Barbarian announced a filmmaker fascinated by destabilisation: the sudden reconfiguration of audience assumptions, the willingness to abandon one story for another and the conviction that horror becomes more effective when the viewer cannot quite predict what the film is going to do next. Weapons expanded that impulse. Its fractured perspectives and shifting character emphasis demonstrated a filmmaker increasingly interested in how information changes our understanding of horror. Cregger’s movies have consistently asked the audience to reassess what it thinks it is watching.

Resident Evil is different. It is arguably his most straightforward film, but that does not make it less considered. In some respects, the constraints of the franchise force Cregger to become more precise. There is no need to manufacture the sort of narrative rug-pulls that powered Barbarian or the structural complexity of Weapons. Instead, Cregger takes an existing piece of popular culture and asks a deceptively difficult question: what would it actually feel like to be trapped inside a Resident Evil game? The answer is Bryan. Cregger has spoken about wanting to recreate the soul and pacing of the games rather than construct a scene-for-scene adaptation, and that distinction is crucial. The film does not require Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield or any of the franchise’s established heroes because Bryan is not supposed to be one of them. He is supposed to be us.

The Loser as Player

Bryan is spectacularly ill-equipped for the apocalypse. He is not a police officer, soldier or special agent. He does not have years of survival training and he does not suddenly discover a hidden reservoir of action-hero competence when the monsters arrive. When he encounters the weapons that would traditionally transform a horror protagonist into an action hero, Cregger instead makes them extensions of Bryan’s incompetence. That is where Austin Abrams becomes indispensable.

Abrams does not play Bryan as a secretly capable action hero waiting to emerge. He plays him as a man who is frightened, confused, frustrated and frequently overwhelmed. His body becomes part of the film’s comedy: running, stumbling, panting, screaming, improvising and occasionally looking at the nightmare unfolding around him with the exhausted disbelief of someone who has absolutely no idea why this has become his problem. Bryan is funny because he is human. His reactions are often the reactions that a normal person might actually have if confronted with a mutated creature, a zombie or a grotesque biological impossibility. He does not become cool under pressure. He does not suddenly acquire the vocabulary of the action movie. He swears, panics, runs and makes mistakes.

Because Cregger largely isolates him, Abrams has to carry an enormous amount of the film almost by himself. This is not simply a performance of dialogue. It is a performance of reaction. The camera watches Bryan experience the game. At various points, he effectively becomes the audience’s controller. He searches rooms, tries objects, discovers weapons, encounters locked doors, learns what works and makes mistakes. He gradually becomes better at the game because he is learning how to play it. That progression gives the film a genuine gamification that extends beyond Easter eggs. Bryan is almost an NPC who has accidentally become the player character: a man who does not understand the rules, does not know what he is carrying, does not know how to use the weapons he finds and survives largely because the game keeps presenting him with another objective.

A Green Herb and a World of Rules

For longtime players, Cregger scatters the film with recognisable pieces of Resident Evil iconography. The green healing items. The locked gates. The weapons. The resource management. The increasingly grotesque mutations. The movement through seemingly disconnected environments. The hospital. Raccoon City. The sense that every apparently innocuous room might contain either salvation or something waiting to tear you apart.

These details could easily have become the cinematic equivalent of a merchandise catalogue. Instead, they are integrated into the mechanics of Bryan’s journey. The objects become punctuation marks. Cregger understands that fans do not necessarily need to be shown their favourite characters standing in a doorway. They need to feel that the rules of Resident Evil have suddenly become real. That is a much more sophisticated form of fan service.

The film is therefore remarkably restrained in its mythology. It does not spend its runtime explaining the entire history of Umbrella Corporation or stopping to introduce every recognisable name in the franchise. Instead, it places an ordinary man inside the outbreak and allows the familiar architecture to emerge around him. The result feels less like a remake of a particular Resident Evil game and more like a lost campaign running alongside one.

Cregger’s Hues: Light Inside the Dark

Visually, Cregger also understands the value of contrast. Resident Evil is a film of darkness, but it is not visually monotonous. The cold blue-black of the night, the sickly illumination of abandoned spaces, the sterile artificiality of hospital interiors and the violent eruptions of colour within the gore create a visual language that repeatedly moves between safety and danger. That contrast matters because Resident Evil has always understood light as conditional. A lit room does not necessarily mean a safe room. A familiar corridor can conceal something monstrous. A fluorescent hospital can be considerably more frightening than a dark forest.

Cregger has spoken about growing technically through Weapons, particularly in his understanding of lenses, editing and considering light sources during storyboarding. That development is evident here. The film’s visual choices are not simply about making Raccoon City look appropriately grim. They continually manipulate the relationship between visibility and vulnerability. The darkest spaces are frightening because we cannot see. The brightest spaces can be frightening because we can.

The Joke Is the Pressure Valve

Yet for all the discussion of horror, gore and game mechanics, humour may be the element that keeps Resident Evil moving. Cregger’s comedy background has always been part of his horror vocabulary. Horror and comedy share a similar anatomy: timing, tone, expectation and surprise. The joke often arrives precisely when the film could otherwise become oppressive, with Bryan’s reactions puncturing the grandeur of the apocalypse. His incompetence deflates the macho posturing that has traditionally accompanied video-game protagonists, while the absurdity of the situations becomes part of their entertainment value.

This is also where Resident Evil brushes against what I have come to think of as Gallows Horror: the point at which the joke does not relieve the horror so much as expose how grotesque the situation has become. There is a particular cruelty to laughing at Bryan because the circumstances surrounding him are genuinely appalling. He is frightened, exhausted, increasingly desperate and surrounded by things that should be utterly terrifying, yet his very inability to behave like a conventional horror protagonist becomes funny. The laughter comes not because the danger has disappeared, but because the alternative is to stare directly into the absurdity of it.

That distinction matters. Gallows humour traditionally allows us to laugh in the face of death, but Cregger pushes that instinct into the mechanics of the Resident Evil universe. The game has always contained an inherent absurdity: a character can encounter an impossible biological abomination and then spend several minutes searching a room for a key, solving a puzzle or examining an oddly specific object. Cregger understands that this ridiculousness is part of the franchise’s identity. Rather than smoothing it away in the transition from game to cinema, he allows it to become part of the film’s texture.

Importantly, the humour does not entirely dissolve the horror. It gives the audience somewhere to breathe, but it also makes the next descent into darkness sharper. The laugh becomes a pressure valve, and once that valve closes, the horror rushes back in. This creates a rhythm that keeps the film moving without allowing either tone to completely dominate the other. Cregger reportedly removed some jokes after test audiences found an earlier version too funny, making what remains particularly revealing. The surviving humour is largely embedded in character and circumstance rather than simply being added as comic relief.

And that makes Abrams’ performance even more important. For long stretches, he is effectively performing a solo comedy-horror routine against creatures, environments and visual effects. He has to make the audience laugh without making Bryan ridiculous, frightened without making him pathetic and sympathetic without turning him into a conventional hero. Abrams finds that balance, and in doing so turns Bryan’s predicament into something approaching tragicomedy. We laugh at him because we recognise him, and we recognise him because his instinct to keep running, keep joking and keep moving is also an instinct to avoid confronting what is waiting for him.

The Fear of Becoming Someone Else

The film becomes more interesting when the delivery itself begins to acquire symbolic weight. Bryan spends the entire film carrying something. He does not initially know exactly what it is. He simply knows that it is important and that someone needs it delivered. At the same time, his girlfriend Michelle is carrying something too: a child. The two forms of carrying gradually begin to echo one another.

Bryan’s job is to transport a future that he does not understand. His personal life is confronting him with another future he does not understand. In both cases, the thing being carried represents responsibility. In both cases, Bryan’s instinct is not necessarily to embrace it but to keep moving. Movement becomes his substitute for decision. He drives, runs, delivers, escapes, doubles back and keeps going. What he rarely does is stop and decide what he actually wants.

This is where the film’s apparent simplicity begins to reveal something darker. Bryan is afraid of fatherhood because fatherhood represents irreversible change. His relationship with Michelle has reached a point at which the future can no longer be postponed, and his instinct is to defer the conversation. He is caught between fight and flight, but neither quite describes him. He chooses movement without commitment.

That is his defining state. And it is why the monsters are so effective as extensions of the story. The infected are bodies that have changed without consent. Bryan is terrified of changing by choice.

The Horror of Stagnation

This makes Resident Evil unexpectedly interested in stagnation. At first glance, it is one of the fastest-moving films Cregger has made. Bryan is constantly travelling through new environments, encountering new monsters and receiving new objectives. But psychologically, he is stuck. He has been stuck before the film begins. The outbreak simply gives physical form to that condition.

Every new objective provides Bryan with an excuse not to confront the larger question waiting at home. Deliver the package. Find the weapon. Get through the gate. Reach the hospital. Find the scientists. Get the cure. There is always another task, another immediate problem and another reason not to think about tomorrow. This is precisely what makes the video-game structure so appropriate. Games are built around objectives. The player is constantly told what to do next. Bryan’s life becomes easier when he has an objective because an objective means he does not have to make a decision for himself.

The tragedy is that the game eventually runs out of objectives.

SPOILERS: The Thing He Carries

The ending makes this explicit. Bryan has spent the entire film carrying the thing that might save him. The package he initially believes to be an organ is ultimately revealed to contain a crucial component required to create the antidote. He has been carrying the answer without understanding its significance. But by the time the cure is created, Bryan’s infection has progressed too far.

The irony is devastating. He has done exactly what he was supposed to do. He delivered the package. He completed the mission. He reached the destination. And it still is not enough. The scientists cannot save him before his transformation overwhelms him, and Bryan emerges at the end no longer as the frightened courier we have spent the film following, but as another creature within the world he has been desperately trying to escape.

This is where the film’s fatherhood metaphor becomes particularly bleak. Bryan spends the movie afraid of what becoming a father will do to him. He worries about losing himself. He worries about change. He wants to return to the life he understands. And when he finally confronts the possibility of accepting that responsibility, it is already too late. His body changes without his permission. The thing he feared most happens anyway. He becomes something else.

The film therefore turns his indecision into horror. Bryan has spent the entire night oscillating between fight and flight, between accepting responsibility and escaping it, between confronting the future and postponing it. Eventually there is no decision left to make. The infection makes it for him.

The Answer Was in His Hands

There is a cruel elegance to the fact that Bryan’s salvation is with him for almost the entire film. He does not need to discover the answer. He needs to recognise what he is carrying. That distinction is central to the character.

Bryan is constantly searching for something outside himself: a weapon, an escape route, another person, a safe place, a solution. Yet the most important object in the film is literally attached to him. The cure is in the bag. The future is in the phone. The decision is waiting at home. He simply cannot bring himself to confront it.

This is why his transformation feels more thematically complete than a straightforward “hero gets infected” ending might suggest. The film does not punish Bryan because he is cowardly. It punishes him because he cannot decide what he is willing to become. And perhaps that is the real horror of Resident Evil. Not mutation. Not infection. Not even death. Change without choice.

A Resident Evil About Being the Wrong Person

Cregger’s film ultimately succeeds because it finds a way to make the Resident Evil franchise’s mechanics serve its character rather than the other way around. The game references are fun. The weapons, keys and locked doors reward familiarity. The creatures provide increasingly grotesque obstacles. The first-person sequences place us directly inside Bryan’s panic. But beneath all that is a surprisingly coherent character study.

Bryan is a loser. He is unlucky. He is underprepared. He is perpetually one bad decision away from disaster. And yet we desperately want him to make it. That sympathy is the film’s secret weapon. Because when the inevitable happens, we are not watching a franchise protagonist fall. We are watching an ordinary man who has spent the entire night trying to get home. And he never does.

That is why Austin Abrams matters so much. Without his ability to make Bryan funny, frightened, irritating, vulnerable and ultimately tragic, the film’s elaborate game mechanics would remain mechanics. Abrams gives them a human pulse. Cregger, meanwhile, has reached an intriguing point in his development. Barbarian demonstrated his ability to destroy audience expectations. Weapons showed a filmmaker increasingly interested in structure, perspective and the emotional consequences of horror. Resident Evil demonstrates something slightly different: that Cregger can take an enormous piece of existing popular culture and impose a coherent authorial sensibility upon it without needing to dominate it.

He understands that the franchise’s real appeal has never been simply zombies and monsters. It is the feeling of being trapped in a place where every decision matters. Every bullet matters. Every door matters. Every object matters. And eventually, every choice matters.

Bryan spends the entire film trying not to choose. By the end, the choice has been taken from him. The courier finally stops moving. The game is over. And the man who could never decide what he wanted to become becomes something else entirely.

• Saul Muerte