RESIDENT EVIL’s Bonkers Surprising Ending Was Not What I Expected, and I Kind of Loved It

Well, that certainly took an unexpected turn!

Zach Cregger’s Resident Evilspends most of its lean 90-minute runtime putting its hero through an increasingly nasty and intense survival horror nightmare, only to completely pull the rug out from under us in its final minutes.

I genuinely wasn’t expecting the movie to end where it does, and I imagine plenty of fans are going to walk out wondering what the hell they just watched.

Personally, I really liked it. It’s strange, gruesome, surprisingly heartbreaking, and completely bonkers. More importantly, it feels perfectly at home in the Resident Evil universe. I’m very curious to see how audiences react because this is absolutely the kind of ending people are going to want to talk about.

Cregger taking on Resident Evil was already an exciting choice. After making Barbarian and Weapons, he could have continued focusing entirely on original horror, but instead he jumped into a franchise with a long and very uneven history of movie adaptations.

Some fans were disappointed when it became clear that his film wouldn’t directly adapt a particular storyline or center on one of the familiar heroes from Capcom’s games. Instead, Cregger went after something different. He made a movie designed to capture what it feels like to actually play a survival horror game.

It paid off. Resident Evil is the highest-rated movie in the franchise and the highest-rated video game movie of all time. The film throws viewers into a fast, nightmarish trip through Raccoon City, but its ending is where Cregger takes his biggest swing.

The story follows Austin Abrams as Bryan, a courier desperately trying to deliver something to Raccoon City General Hospital. Getting there becomes an insane nightmare as he encounters increasingly horrific creatures, including a mutant dog and an infected little girl who manages to bite him on the arm.

Bryan eventually ends up in a car with an Umbrella Corporation executive, and that’s when he finally learns what he’s actually carrying. Bryan is transporting part of a cure for Umbrella’s virus. His job is to get it to a laboratory team capable of synthesizing it.

That information suddenly becomes very important to Bryan because, well… he’s infected. He wants some of the cure for himself, but Resident Evil isn’t about to make things easy for the poor guy.

Bryan has to survive zombies, acid-spewing monsters, and a horrifying amalgamation creature before finally reaching the lab and handing over what he’s been carrying. By then, however, something is very wrong.

Bryan tries hiding the mutation spreading through his hand, but his body quickly becomes impossible to control. Tentacles erupt from his back. A massive mouth filled with teeth tears open across his stomach.

The guy we’ve followed through this entire horrific journey transforms into something that looks like it wandered out of John Carpenter’s The Thing. This is where the ending really got me.

Bryan is still in there. He’s begging the scientists for the cure while his mutated body essentially betrays him, with his new extremities violently killing the people around him. After watching him struggle to survive for the entire movie, there’s something genuinely sad about seeing him finally reach his destination only to lose control of himself.

Then Cregger goes for the throat.

The cure slips away and falls more than 20 stories to the ground. A National Guard helicopter appears, its spotlight lands on the fully mutated Bryan, and the screen cuts to black.

Resident Evil.

Roll credits.

I was very shocked! I expected things to get crazy because this is Resident Evil, but I didn’t expect the movie to turn Bryan into the monster at the end of his own story. It’s such a wonderfully jacked-up way to finish his journey.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I liked what Cregger was doing. The Resident Evil games frequently tell stories through pieces of information players discover while exploring.

You’ll find documents, scientific notes, recordings, journals, and other scraps explaining what happened to people before you arrived. Sometimes you’re essentially discovering the horrible origin story of the creature you’re eventually going to fight.

That’s what Bryan’s story feels like. The creature he becomes isn’t pulled directly from the games. It’s an original monster created for the movie. Yet the entire film can almost be viewed as the tragic backstory of a massive Resident Evil boss encounter.

We didn’t just stumble across the monster. We spent 90 minutes getting to know the poor bastard who became it.

That makes the ending much more interesting to me. If another character eventually encounters mutated Bryan, the audience already knows exactly what happened to him. Imagine someone like Leon Kennedy walking into that lab during a game, finding a few scattered documents describing Bryan’s delivery, and then eventually encountering this gigantic mutated monstrosity.

Except this time, we watched the entire story contained in those documents. There’s currently no guarantee that a sequel will happen, although Cregger has expressed interest in continuing. The movie certainly leaves Bryan in a position where his story could continue, even if the film itself doesn’t explicitly promise anything.

For anyone wondering whether Resident Evil sneaks in a mid-credits or post-credits scene teasing the future, it doesn’t.

Once that Resident Evil title card appears following Bryan’s transformation, the movie is finished. There’s no Leon Kennedy reveal, no Umbrella tease, and no extra scene telling us who might encounter Bryan next.

I actually appreciate that restraint. The ending is weird and abrupt enough that throwing another franchise tease onto it could have taken some of the punch away.

Of course, if Bryan ever does return as a giant boss monster, Cregger has created an amusing problem for audiences. Who are we supposed to root for? If Leon or another familiar Resident Evil character eventually has to unload a ridiculous amount of ammunition into this thing, part of me is still going to be thinking, “Come on, Bryan!”

That’s what makes the ending work for me. It’s bleak, gross, sad, funny in a twisted way, and completely unexpected. I definitely wasn’t expecting Resident Evil to end with its protagonist becoming the kind of horrifying creature you’d normally spend an entire game preparing to fight.

It’s a pretty bonkers choice, but within the world of Resident Evil, it fits! I can also see it being divisive. After following Bryan for the whole movie and rooting for him to get that cure, some viewers may not love having the story cut to black at the worst possible moment for him. Others are probably going to eat up the sheer insanity of it.

I landed in the latter camp. The surprise is a big part of why I enjoyed it. Now I want to know what everyone else thought!