I’ve been surprised by the number of Resident Evil fans complaining on social media about Zach Cregger’s cinematic adaptation of the survival horror series. Were we watching the same film? Certainly, it doesn’t feature any of the familiar heroes – there’s no Leon, no Claire, no Ada Wong – and there’s a distinct lack of recognisable antagonists and well-known locations.
Despite all of this, Cregger’s interpretation is one of the most accurate and interesting video game films ever made. On the surface, it’s about a zombifying virus that gets accidentally released in Raccoon City by the Umbrella Corporation. These are, of course, the foundations of the Resi mythos.
More interestingly, Cregger seeks to replicate and explore the structural and narrative conventions of the series. In the film, the player character, hapless courier Bryan Hodukavich, is thrust into a viral outbreak, with no weapons and no idea what’s going on. He is then submerged into an uncanny shadow world of escalating peril and body horror.
The film takes us through a series of locations dragged straight from the games – an abandoned farmhouse, a road tunnel crammed with abandoned cars, a hospital and the obligatory sewer level. As he progresses, Bryan finds increasingly powerful weapons, from a handgun to an assault rifle – but he is always short on ammo. And there are typewriters in at least two scenes!
Bryan’s understanding of the world is shaped, as in any Resident Evil game, through found footage (voice recordings, emails etc) and via short, enigmatic interchanges with non-player characters. There’s a sequence in the road tunnel where a recently infected young girl says to Bryan: “My mom bit me, I don’t know where she went.” This is a classic Resident Evil exchange: in one terse sentence she gives us narrative information and an implied threat – the mother could be lurking anywhere nearby, waiting to pounce … Aware perhaps of online discourse, Cregger released a video explaining his vision for the movie, and how he has sought to reflect not just the fictitious universe of the games, but also the experience of playing them – that sense of quickly moving through a world of endlessly evolving horror. It’s also been interesting to see theories emerge about Bryan’s role as a sort of NPC precursor to a true lead character, leaving the hints, tips and ammo behind for someone capable to pick up.
I always thought thatthe subsidiary non-playable characters in the early Resident Evil titles had the most interesting stories: affable old Barry Burton from the first game, cowardly helicopter pilot Brad Vickers from Resi 3, Resident Evil 4’s omnipresent merchant. If there’s a situation where you’re not 100% sure that you can avoid or defeat the enemies, if you feel maybe there’s a chance you’ll make it – that’s where horror lies.” Bryan Hodukavich lives in that space for the whole film. Cregger’s Resident Evil should perhaps be put alongside Kane Parsons’s Backrooms and Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 as a movie that is as much an exploration of video game mechanics as it is any sort of translation.
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