I know literally nothing about video games. But there’s no denying that an entire generation has grown up playing them, and their expectations from horror/action movies are quite different from ours. Many of the horror films released in recent years seem to reflect this. As someone who has been completely outside of that experience, I’m starting to feel old.
Because what I expect from a horror movie isn’t zombies jumping at us from the darkness, a character getting trapped in a room caught in an endless loop, or a girlfriend suddenly turning into a maniacal killer. Much like I believe a comedy is at its best when it brings out the little details of everyday life that nobody usually notices, I approach horror movies in much the same way. Yet, so far, I haven’t seen a film that has fully delivered on that desire.
However, that doesn’t mean I disliked Resident Evil, the latest film from Zach Cregger, the director of Weapons and Barbarian. Quite the opposite. The film uses one of my favorite storytelling formulas: it focuses on a single character and one particular night in his life.
Bryan is a medical courier who has to deliver an emergency package to Raccoon City Hospital. But on the way, he finds himself in the middle of a zombie outbreak, and the story quickly turns into a straightforward fight for survival. The entire film takes place over the course of a single night, and Bryan is constantly moving from one place to another: the road, a house, a tunnel, a camper, the streets, the sewers, the hospital… At every stop, he encounters a new attack or a new creature. There’s no long moment to catch his breath, no transition to another day. One event follows another. As a result, the film is relentlessly kinetic, dragging you from one incident to the next almost without giving you a chance to breathe, just like Bryan.
In fact, the story’s breakneck pace strangely but appropriately reminded me of the 2013 film Metallica: Through the Never… It turns out that the package Bryan is carrying contains a substance needed to develop a treatment for the outbreak. Bryan gets bitten. He reaches the laboratory at the hospital and delivers the treatment, but eventually the virus takes over his body. He turns into a monster. The treatment disappears, and the film ends with his transformation.
I was quite pleased that the film chose to end on such a dark note rather than giving our protagonist a hopeful ending in which he triumphantly watches the sun rise after achieving victory. Because this eliminates the possibility of a potential sequel… It does, right?
