00:00The actual story feels less like an adaptation of Capcom's narratives in a world-building
00:03and more like Zack Greger making his own monster movie inside the franchise's toy box.
00:08The movie follows Brian, played by Austin Abrams, a medical courier whose principal
00:13qualification for surviving the apocalypse is that he really would like to finish his shift.
00:17Brian is not an elite police officer, special forces operative, or bioterrorism expert.
00:22He's a man carrying a package through a snowstorm while talking to his girlfriend Michelle about
00:26whether the two of them are ready to become parents.
00:28Several hours later he's firing guns at tentacled mutations and attempting to deliver an important
00:33package to Raccoon City while fighting off infection.
00:36That allows Greger to recreate something previous adaptations struggled with,
00:40the feeling of actually playing Resident Evil.
00:42Brian begins vulnerable and completely unarmed.
00:45He acquires weapons gradually, discovers ammunition, encounters doors that refuse to open despite
00:50the firearm in his hand, crawls into sewers because no outbreak in this universe is permitted
00:55to occur without a sewer level and is pursued by a biological monstrosity that refuses to
00:59respect the concept of personal space.
01:01Even the structure resembles a game.
01:03Brian has a destination, an inventory, and increasingly ridiculous obstacles preventing him from reaching
01:08it.
01:09The farmhouse becomes his first combat arena.
01:11The abandoned tunnel becomes a forced route.
01:14Raccoon City introduces high-level enemies while the hospital becomes the final dungeon,
01:18complete with an acid-spewing monster, a horrendous maternity ward, a laboratory on the top floor,
01:23and a bio-organic weapon waiting for the final battle.
01:26The other thing to note is how often the film plays like a comedy.
01:29There are genuinely creepy images, horrific creature designs, and moments where Greger gets
01:33close to building the kind of suffocating dread the games create.
01:36But he repeatedly punctures that tension with jokes and absurd humor.
01:40Sometimes it works, but just as often the comedy arrives too early and too frequently
01:44and drains the fear out of a scene before it's had time to settle.
01:47Instead of letting the audience sit with uncertainty, isolation, or fear, the film reaches for a
01:52laugh, which makes the whole thing feel more self-aware than a Resident Evil story arguably
01:56should be.
01:57Hey guys, it's Niat here.
01:59To date, we're breaking down the film, exploring the outbreak story, monsters, virus, and the
02:04meaning of the ending.
02:05Don't forget to smash the like and subscribe buttons before Umbrella turns you into its next
02:09test subject and hit the notification icon, or else something with a way too many teeth will
02:13crash through the nearest wall.
02:14I have an emergency here.
02:16Hello?
02:16Can you hear me?
02:18Are you on a spirit?
02:19Ah!
02:24The film opens with Brian arriving at a hospital for a medical delivery.
02:27He is exhausted, irritated by unhelpful staff, and ready to go home when Dr. Maria Stokes
02:32asks him to make one final drop-off.
02:34Brian initially refuses until he hears the magical phrase, double pay.
02:38There's only one catch and complication.
02:41The delivery is not local.
02:42It needs to go to Raccoon City.
02:44And for anyone familiar with Resident Evil, hearing those words should have roughly the
02:48same effect as hearing somebody announce that their next holiday destination is Silent Hill.
02:52Brian, of course, knows nothing.
02:54Damn, Raccoon City is another town at the end of an unpleasant drive rather than one of
02:59gaming's most famous municipal disasters.
03:01So he heads into the mountains through darkness and heavy snow while speaking with his girlfriend
03:05Michelle.
03:06Their conversation establishes the life Brian is unknowingly driving away from.
03:09Michelle is pregnant, and the two are struggling with the enormous question of becoming parents.
03:14Brian clearly loves her but sounds frightened by what that responsibility means.
03:18It is a mundane anxiety to give somebody moments before he enters a world where the definition
03:22of family planning is about to include avoiding reproductive viral biomass in a maternity ward.
03:27A woman then suddenly appears on the road and Brian hits her.
03:30This is the first domino, and from this point onward, the film essentially refuses to let him stop
03:35moving.
03:36Brian finds the injured woman in the woods position unnaturally but still alive and places her inside
03:40his vehicle.
03:41Before he can decide what to do next, Sheriff Wilson pulls him over for swerving.
03:45Brian explains the accident that took place, shows him the woman, and agrees to follow the
03:49sheriff while Wilson transports her towards medical help.
03:52Unfortunately, the police car swerves off the road moments later.
03:56Brian stops and discovers Wilson dead, while the woman has miraculously disappeared.
04:00When she re-emerges, she is feral, aggressive, and already demonstrating that this outbreak
04:05is unhinged.
04:06Dad, please, leave me alone.
04:11Brian grabs Wilson's pistol and responds like a man with a little experience with weapons
04:16by producing an impressive quantity of noise while hitting almost everything except the
04:20thing attacking him.
04:21A few rounds actually strike his end vehicle, rendering his transportation significantly less
04:25useful and establishing another recurring feature of the film.
04:28Brian is surviving through panic and improvisation rather than action hero competence.
04:33He heads toward a nearby farmhouse on foot, where Craig begins building the movie like
04:38the opening area of a Resident Evil game.
04:40The property initially appears abandoned, but the family dog begins chasing Brian and forces
04:44him into a barn.
04:45At first it looks like an aggressive farm animal defending its territory, then its mouth splits
04:49apart, producing long fleshy tendrils, telling us that these are not simply reanimated
04:54zombies operating under Romero rules.
04:56The pathogen is actively remodeling anatomy, selecting whatever mutation might allow the
05:00host to continue attacking and spreading.
05:02The dog calls back to the infected canines that have haunted the franchise since the original
05:06Spencer Mansion, but the tentacles evoke later Resident Evil infections, particularly the
05:11plague mutations of Resident Evil 4, where fatal damage can cause parasitic appendages to
05:16erupt from the host.
05:17Brian manages to kill the dog and enters the farmhouse looking for a phone to call Michelle,
05:21and the environment is littered with references.
05:24A typewriter sits in one room, recognizable to players as the franchise's traditional save
05:29mechanism.
05:29In the games, finding a typewriter means reaching one of those precious locations where the player
05:34can finally unclench their shoulders and butthole, knowing an enormous monster or zombie will
05:38not enter.
05:39Brian sees it, but of course in a film, those mechanics don't work.
05:43What the room does provide is a break from the madness occurring around him.
05:47Clocks appear throughout the property as another smaller reference to the puzzle box architecture
05:50of the games, where no mansion, police station or laboratory can contain a conventional locking
05:55mechanism, when an ornamental clock and several gemstone-shaped keys could accomplish the same
05:59task with dramatically greater inconvenience.
06:02Brian will soon encounter the film's recurring joke about padlocks as well.
06:06Doors remain stubbornly resistant to bullets because Resident Evil has always lived in a
06:10universe where a 12-gauge shotgun may obliterate an infected head, but remain spiritually incapable
06:14of defeating a small metal latch until the correct key has been located in somebody's drawer.
06:19The injured woman turns out to be the lady of the farmhouse and her husband is infected
06:23as well.
06:24He attacks Brian who manages to shoot him with Wilson's pistol before loading a shotgun he
06:28found inside.
06:29The woman charges upstairs and Brian blows her head apart, which under traditional zombie
06:34rules would qualify as a fairly definitive solution.
06:36Instead tendrils erupt from her neck, reach towards her husband and begin connecting the two
06:41bodies into a spider-like composite creature that will become Brian's stalking enemy for much
06:45of the film.
06:46The organisms don't merely revive or mutate independently, infected biomass is capable of
06:55assimilating other infected tissue, using corpses as biological material to continue evolving.
07:01The dead couple recombine into something entirely new, and this is one of the reasons the pathogen
07:06resembles the G-virus more than the classic D-virus.
07:09In the games, William Birkin's Golgotha virus produces a runaway cellular revolution.
07:14The host doesn't settle into one stable mutated form.
07:17Damage triggers further adaptation.
07:19New tissue develops unpredictably.
07:21Giant eyes appear, and the organism becomes increasingly distant from anything recognizably
07:25human.
07:26The infection in Craig's film follows a similar philosophy.
07:29Killing the host does not stop the biological process because the cells are programmed around
07:33survival, growth, and recombination.
07:35At the same time, the tendrils evoke lost plagas and later infections in the franchise.
07:40Plagas attach themselves to a host nervous system and can preserve surprisingly sophisticated
07:44behavior until damage causes appendages to erupt.
07:48Craig seems to be combining recognizable pieces of several Resident Evil bioweapons rather than
07:53adapting one virus.
07:54The infection functions as a greatest-hit biological nightmare.
07:58G-style evolution and assimilation, plaga-like tendrils, the speed and transmissibility expected
08:03of an outbreak virus, and eventually the production of something resembling a tiring class bio-organic
08:08weapon.
08:09Brian tries stealing the couple's truck and smashing through the property gate, only to
08:13total the vehicle.
08:13This ties into a recurring game-choke about luck progression.
08:17In a normal situation, a truck should be a reasonably persuasive argument against a gate.
08:21In Resident Evil, the gate wins because Brian has not located the correct key with a matching
08:25symbol on it.
08:26He continues on foot and eventually reaches a tunnel jammed with abandoned vehicles, including
08:31an RV.
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