Resident Evil’s Ending Is the Right Kind of Cruel

This post discusses the ending of Resident Evil. If you consider that a spoiler and care about such things, stop reading now.

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil isn’t the kind of movie that does plot twists. The Weapons and Barbarian writer-director’s exhilarating, goofy franchise debut is remarkably straightforward, taking audiences on a propulsive ride along with a poor sap who is about to have the worst day in his life. That boyish man is Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who accepts a job that will take him outside his normal route to Raccoon City, which unbeknownst to him has become overrun by monsters. Bryan meets few people in his journey, none of them have stories of their own, and Resident Evil does not recontextualize a thing as it plows through its trim 95-minute run time.

What the movie does offer is an ending that is downright mean. It’s a closing beat that lands like the final punch line in a film full of gags, a pitch-black send-off that’s liable to leave audiences wondering what exactly they just watched.

To recap: At the start of the second act, Bryan gets bitten by a mutated girl. Shortly after, he encounters Paul (Paul Walter Hauser), a scientist for the Umbrella Corporation, the pharmaceutical company responsible for the outbreak turning everyone in Raccoon City into monsters. Paul tells Bryan that he’s been unknowingly carrying the material required to synthesize a cure, and because Bryan suddenly has a dire need for the cure, he remains committed to his delivery even as it takes him deeper into the horrors. The movie ends with Bryan successfully getting his package to the scientists working on a cure, but shortly thereafter succumbing to his infection, turning into an increasingly grotesque (though conflicted) monster and killing them all. As a syringe containing the cure falls to the ground many stories below, Monster Bryan stands atop the hospital’s skybridge and roars at an approaching National Guard helicopter. Smash to credits. 

Given the relentless momentum of the movie and its sudden stop, the story may feel unresolved — but it’s possible Cregger is making a point. While Bryan’s normalness is key to Resident Evil’s success, he’s not purely here to be relatable. The movie starts with Bryan arguing with his girlfriend, Michelle, over her pregnancy, selfishly refusing to consider what she might want and centering his own anxiety over having a kid. By the end of the film, when he’s made it to the hospital but is unsure he’ll make it to the top before succumbing to his infection, he has a come-to-Jesus moment, recording a voice memo for Michelle apologizing and saying that he is in fact ready to be a dad.

But is he really? Cregger’s previous films have a lot of fun subverting the assumptions viewers likely make about the characters, and here, in a film that’s so playfully aware of horror tropes, the ending may argue that living through the nightmare of a horror movie doesn’t necessary ennoble a person, not actually. If Bryan truly was ready to be a parent, and to put others above himself, the best way to demonstrate that fact would be to recognize that a cure is a good thing for the world his kid will inherit. This is not what Bryan does. He stays in the room, hoping to be the one to take the dose the scientists have created. When that doesn’t happen in time, he ruins any hope for mankind’s survival. Game over.

This is in line with Cregger’s stated vision for his Resident Evil. “He had this idea of basically bringing a random, normal guy with no skills into the Resident Evil situation,” explained Constantin Films CEO and Resident Evil producer Oliver Berben on a recent episode of The Town, “and have him, and the audience, feel what it’s like to play that game.” To that end, the film gets a lot of mileage out of Austin Abrams’s performance — the nerves, the bewilderment, the scrounging, the swearing. It also ends on a note familiar to most first-time players of any given survival game: one of futility.

In interviews, Cregger has said that Resident Evil is his first and only foray into franchise filmmaking, although he won’t entirely rule out a sequel. The director prides himself on his original films, and his next, The Flood, will be another original feature. Ending the movie this way makes it a nasty little closed loop where the filmmaker takes his toys and goes home. He’s why people came to see Resident Evil, and whoever comes next will have to bring their own mojo.

Of course, with the film’s glowing critical reception and box-office triumph, Sony will almost certainly want Cregger to come back — and he’s the sort of inventive filmmaker who could figure out where to take it. This first installment has few ties to the actual material from the game. It plays fast and loose with how the virus works, every direct reference is almost always a joke (the running gag with padlocks, the cluttered room with a typewriter in it), and while Cregger allows for the events of Resident Evil 2 and 3 to be happening off in the distance, he’s not trying to expand on them. If you reach, you could say that Cregger’s Resident Evil offers a reason why there is no cure for the zombie plague that afflicts these games, and that Bryan’s final monstrous form is similar to that of William Birkin, the mutated scientist that players must confront at the end of Resident Evil 2. Trivial stuff. This is not a film for fan theories.

Given Cregger’s outside-the-box approach to this movie, any sequel he were to make would likely stand alone in a similar manner — it would be another entry in an anthology of Resident Evil films that all have that Zach Cregger feeling. Raccoon City is but one setting in the video games’ globe-trotting canon. There are Resident Evil games set in Spanish castles, runaway trains, ocean liners, weird mansions, the bayou, and strange theme-park-like villages, with bespoke creatures in each. It’s a lot to toy with, even irreverently.

But for now that’s a big question mark. Resident Evil’s finale makes a meal out of dashing your hopes for a happy ending or a direct follow-up. It’s a ballsy, almost hostile move for a film that is ostensibly trying to revive interest in a long-running movie series based on an even longer-running series of video games. Yet it’s also refreshing to get a feisty little film called Resident Evil that doesn’t care about baiting audiences for the next one.