Following the brilliant Barbarian and the even better Weapons, comedian-turned-filmmaker Zach Cregger completes a horror hat-trick by stamping his directorial personality all over this tense and surprisingly imaginative reboot of the barely-mourned franchise based on a popular computer game.
The story concerns a medical courier fighting off hordes of zombies in Raccoon City, a backdrop that seems to have relocated Gotham City to Transylvania. Cregger builds an atmosphere of suspense and mystery around his likeably hapless hero from the start, his camera following him down corridors full of people ignoring him as they busily attend to numerous strange cases of laceration trauma.
The clinically fraught environment of the hospital makes a stark contrast with the dark and stormy night outside, all snowy wastes and deserted streets where the threat grows with every sanguinary chomp. The hardest of cuts, accompanied by orchestral stabs on the soundtrack, shove us from one level to another, as Cregger plays every trick in the book on us with the confidence of a past master.
He’s not above the odd cheesy jump scare, but he uses them to intensify the moment rather than let us off its bloody hook. Medium-long takes keep us in the protagonist’s fragile frame of mind, either from over his shoulder or through patient close-ups on his confused, astonished or horrified little face.
In response, Austin Abrams equips his garrulous, incredulous everyman with enough charm and humour that we sincerely hope he’ll make it to the end of the movie. Indeed, his well-worked subjectivity serves not only to secure our emotional investment but also to tighten the suspense – we only see the events of the plot through his eyes, and he never has any idea what’s going on.
The monsters themselves have a little more personality than the mindless identikit flesh-scoffers who usually populate this sub-genre. They display evidence of tactical nous in their relentless pursuit, and they look bizarre enough to put the willies right up HP Lovecraft.
Cregger seems all too aware that without the scary music and the ever-present prospect of terrible violence, much of this could come off as absurdist comedy. Perhaps because of his pre-horror background, he knows when to let the audience exhale a few chuckles in between the explosions of gore. Like a brilliant chemist, he mixes the two elements into more than the sum of their parts.
Exhuming dead movie franchises is usually about as welcome (and stinky) as an actual zombie apocalypse would be, and genre veterans will be very familiar with the tropes, clichés and sly references to other films (one bit of Carpentry in particular). But the director juggles or subverts them with such wit and expertise that they seem fresh as recently-split blood.
Resident Evil takes the artistically bankrupt assignment of the video-game movie and applies to it far more of the impressive skills Zach Cregger has developed over his previous films than it deserves. He wastes little time in getting his hero up a tree, even less time throwing rocks at him, and keeps us guessing as to how and whether he’ll get him down again.
-Stew Mott-
