After Hours: RESIDENT EVIL

Zach Cregger knows how to communicate a character thinking under pressure. He builds sequences to frame tightening suspense around a figure nervously assessing surroundings and accumulating quick observations. The camera moves with their attention, the editing allowing us to think alongside them. One plus one equals two. We’re drawn into their plight because we’re adding it up, too. The mystery basement and rental confusion of Barbarian and the eerie class disappearance of Weapons are great spaces and dynamics to build his twisty, back-and-forth chronologies that allow revelations to fall into place with tight, satisfying turns. His latest is the fourth attempt to make a live action version of the Resident Evil survival horror zombie video games, following the Milla Jovovich action franchise, a one-off creepy-house reboot, and a one-season Netflix show. Turns out Cregger’s brand of horror filmmaking is perfect for reimagining this world for cinema. He’s consistently demonstrated a light touch, a clever structure, a human sense of peril and nervous laughter. Combined with the active mind behind the framing and pacing, it makes for an involving sense of escalating dread. This ends up being his most narratively straightforward, proceeding in a straight chronological line with one complication following another. 

Our lead is a hospital courier (Austin Abrams) on an overtime run taking a refrigerated bag to the next town over. It’s dangerous enough that it’s a dark and snowy night and the route takes him down a winding rural road. But he’ll soon find out he’s headed straight into a zombie outbreak. We move from the side of the road, to an isolated farmhouse, and onward. A tight focus on a sympathetic protagonist’s chain of thinking and strategizing gives it a constant forward momentum. How’s he going to get out of this one? Each variable slides into place, solving one problem and creating another. Cregger pulls off a kind of magic trick here. It’s a movie that’s so clearly indebted to the process of working level by level through a video game. Cregger even pulls off some first-person shots that flow perfectly into Dariusz Wolski’s fluid cinematography. So although it’s wearing its origins so obviously, it’s also so clearly a movie, with a cinematic sense of pacing and spacing, and a close-up interest in the character whose mind is puzzling through these problems. It delights in performances—from the lead through as fine a collection of one-scene wonders as you’d ever want to see—and in a fun procession of jumping surprises and honest laughs. It’s as likely to startle with a sudden appearance of a monster as it is to find humor in its lead’s stammering disbelief. It adds up to a fast, fun survival story with suitably satisfying cinematic tricks. It’s all technique, but what great technique!