Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier, is given a last-minute job to deliver a mysterious package to Raccoon City.
As Bryan nears his destination, he slowly realises the town has been overcome by some kind of malignant force - and his package may be the key to stopping it.
I have never played Resident Evil, and maybe seen 15 minutes of the 2002 movie almost twenty years ago. This movie was only on my radar because of Zach Creggar.
I loved Barbarian. I didn't like Weapons as much - it felt too scattered in focus.
Resident Evil is more in line with Barbarian, in its focus on a single character unknowingly descending deeper into peril.
It is also engineered to ratchet up the tension, providing set ups that are often as funny as they are nerve-shredding.
There is no line between the mechanics of horror and comedy, and Creggar runs between the two like a veteran veteran jazz player - seemingly unpredictable but completely locked in.
Austin Abrams is an empathetic anchor as the unlucky courier whose dedication to the job masks a desire to avoid confronting problems at home.
What works about the character and the film is that his early actions - which are fairly familiar for protagonists in horror - make sense: his ignorance comes across as human rather than mandated by the filmmakers.
After a strange woman walks in front of his car, and then disappears after he hits her, he follows her trail into the woods because he thinks he is helping a car accident victim.
The film plays like a quest narrative, with our hero wandering through a series of vignettes - a dark wooded road, a farmstead, a sewer, a street - which each present our hero with a unique environment, cast and obstacle to overcome.
These darkly comic set-pieces - including an encounter with a hilariously mismatched Paul Walter Hauser and Kali Reis as corporate employees who escort Bryan for part of his journey.
A perfectly engineered crowdpleaser. I have not had such a good time in theatres in a while.
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