Resident Evil Gives an NPC His Time to Shine

Bryan (Austin Abrams), the medical courier at the center of the new Resident Evil movie, has an unfortunate habit of announcing his presence by calling out “Hello?” whenever he walks into a forbidding new space. At first, this reflex is reasonable. It’s what someone might do when they, say, walk through the unlocked front door of a stranger’s home while hoping to use their landline, because no one’s answering the doorbell and things have already started to get weird out there on the snowy road to Raccoon City. But by the time Bryan calls it out to the enormous nude man with a quivering abdomen while he’s taking refuge from monsters underground, it’s become a bit. Bryan, who describes himself at one point as a “glorified Postmates driver” for transplant organs, is in no way a badass. His only experience with guns is from video games, he’s not terribly bright or capable of acting with urgency, and he has no clue about the ongoing disaster he’s in the middle of. Every increasingly inappropriate “hello” feels like an act of wishful thinking. It’s as if he were to try hard enough, he could will himself into a less infernal scenario by pretending that whatever latest nightmare he’s come across is one that might actually turn out to be benign.

It makes more sense to look at Resident Evil as the new Zach Cregger movie than the latest big-screen take on the long-running franchise, because while it’s technically based on the video games, it doesn’t focus on any of the series’ characters. It’s the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of adaptations, a horror comedy centering a fumbling minor player whose perspective on the apocalyptic action is limited. Bryan’s a gig worker who’s been hired by the nefarious Umbrella Corporation to transport what turns out to be an essential package through a chemical outbreak that they caused. He has no survival skills and a stonerish tendency to stare blankly at the body-horror scenarios unfurling in front of him instead of running away as fast as he can. To filter a movie about the origins of a zombie/monster epidemic through the point of view of a hapless outsider is an amusing, if rather one-note, concept. But Cregger is the filmmaker behind Barbarian and the even better Weapons. He’s the hottest horror director working today, and if Resident Evil is his least interesting film to date, it’s still a deftly done, bitterly funny riff on the absurdities of the genre.

Most compellingly, Resident Evil is about fear and what drives characters to do the many ill-advised things that horror movies require them to do. One of the most memorable scenes in Barbarian, Cregger’s startling 2022 debut about an Airbnb rental gone very wrong, is the one in which Tess (Georgina Campbell) goes down a set of hidden stairs into the darkness because a man she recently met is calling for help. It’s a comically bad idea, but Tess is a good person who doesn’t have it in her to abandon someone in desperate need. Rather than just present her as doing the stupid thing like so much slasher fodder, the movie emphasizes how terrified she is, that she knows she shouldn’t be doing this but is going ahead anyway, the sound of her gasping breaths overwhelming everything else as she steps shakily into the unknown. Bryan, on the other hand, opts for denial throughout Resident Evil, for an insistence that he could return the world to its status quo if he pretends that the face of the dog that chased him through a barn didn’t split open like a toothy flower to hurl tongue tentacles in his direction. Early in the movie, he skids along an empty tree-lined road, his mind only on the disastrous conversation he’s having with his girlfriend on the phone. But Cregger shoots the scene in such a way that the red taillights of his car make the snowy thoroughfare look like a tunnel to hell, even if it’s only obvious to us.

Abrams, who has solid comic timing and a soft-jawlined face that’ll be boyish until he’s in his 50s, was James in Weapons, the kid with a drug addiction and no place to live who ironically is the only one able to spot the witch’s lair in town. His character in Resident Evil serves the opposite role of the normie who simply does not want to acknowledge the unfolding of an apocalypse around him. His Bryan opens the movie by saying all the wrong things on the phone to his girlfriend, who just told him she’s pregnant. He’s resistant to change even in a world where every living being around him is in the midst of rapid-fire mutation. But even if he’s an entertaining fool who accidentally fires off every gun he picks up, takes elevators when he really shouldn’t because he gets too winded on the stairs, and, yes, always hollers “Hello?” to alert every ominous thing lurking in the dark to his presence, he’s also a person. Resident Evil is a physical comedy at the gruesome end of the world, but it acknowledges that however small Bryan’s own issues may be in comparison, they’re his. He’s just a bit player in the scheme of things, an NPC hauled into the spotlight, but he’s the hero of his own story — and, for the length of this slight but propulsive movie, of ours.