In just the past few years, as he has cemented himself as a force to be reckoned with in modern horror filmmaking, Zach Cregger has developed a real knack for knocking the wind out of you as an audience member just before the credits roll. Rather than adhering to what might seem like the safer or more commonly elected choice, Cregger has demonstrated a penchant for following stories through to their logical narrative and thematic conclusions in startling ways.
Resident Evil, Cregger’s newest film, features a bleak ending that bucks expectations in favor of cutting even deeper and more incisively into its subject matter, and it’s all the better for it.
Weapons is a great place to start in discussing Cregger’s unique ability to build these off-kilter culminations, because it has the kind of ending that sounds absolutely ridiculous on paper but simply works like gangbusters in execution. After spending a full film diving deeper and deeper into the mystery of what happened to this missing group of children and exploring the horrors behind the event from different perspectives, Cregger reveals Aunt Gladys (in a performance from Amy Madigan that won her an Oscar), a witch who has been using her abilities to keep these children under her spell. However, in the film’s final moments, that spell is effectively broken, and it results in a chase sequence in which Gladys runs for her life from a horde of screaming, bloodthirsty children before getting literally torn limb from limb in a white-picket-fence suburban yard.
As if this wasn’t enough, the film closes by reprising its opening narration and having the child narrator close the whole film out with the line, "Some of them even started talking again this year,” in reference to the children who survived but were the victims of Gladys’ spell. It’s an ending that manages to feature both the funniest single scene in the film (the entire chase and subsequent murder of Gladys is obscenely hysterical) and one of the most harrowing final lines of dialogue in recent years. It’s a tonal tightrope walk that shouldn’t work but winds up conveying so much more than any more traditional final showdown ever could have.
Resident Evil follows a similar trajectory in a different way, in that it once again sees Cregger making an abrupt tonal change that serves the larger character work and thematic heft of the film. Early on in the film, Austin Abrams’ medical courier Bryan is bitten by an infected child. He learns shortly thereafter that this means he is now infected and watches over the course of the next few acts as the infection visibly spreads throughout his body. Fortunately, it turns out that if he can get his medical package to Raccoon City General in time, the Umbrella Corporation professionals there are going to utilize it to make a cure for everyone, which could theoretically save him.
As the film progresses, Cregger routinely focuses on Bryan as a character and his own seeming personal evolution. This is a character who starts the film emotionally flailing at the news that his girlfriend is pregnant and spends his entire journey through an infected wasteland learning lessons about himself until he finally arrives at Raccoon City General and has a cumulative epiphany: he was being selfish in his response. He records a message for his girlfriend, spelling all of this out, thinking that he is about to die. But then, when workers from the hospital find him, he is taken upstairs to Umbrella’s lab to deliver the medical package so the cure can be made.
Up until this point, Cregger has explicitly placed the audience with Bryan time and again. The entire film is from his perspective; the camera constantly orbits around him in an effort to put viewers on an explicitly parallel trajectory to him as a character. Cregger even literally showcases Bryan’s POV multiple times throughout the film’s run. So even though he’s a bit of a goof and well-and-truly out of his depths, we are rooting for Bryan, and as he ascends to metaphorical heavens of the top floor lab, it seems like he’s going to make it.
But it’s upon Bryan’s entrance here that Cregger shifts gears. Suddenly, the camera begins to rotate around the scientists working on the cure. Bryan is filmed at more of a distance, as we see his infection beginning to spread quickly, turning him into a monster and contaminating the lab in the process. The others take notice and proceed to attempt to rush through with a cure, with Bryan now positioned as an antagonistic force: a multi-tentacled mutation that is lashing out and killing all of these scientists, one by one, even as the ever-diminishing human part of Bryan begs for them to save him.
The film ends with the final scientist attempting to stick the monster Bryan has become with the cure, only for the monster to viciously murder him and destroy the cure in the process. The film ends with Bryan having been lost entirely to the infection, his entire character arc snuffed out and undone by his own actions. Rather than staying outside the lab, sacrificing himself so that others could get the cure, he went in, knowing that he shouldn’t, in the hopes that the cure could prevent him from turning. It’s a brutal ending that recontextualizes Bryan’s actions from across the film and adds a whole other layer of depth to what has been, up until this point, a joyous genre romp.
Yet again, this is the kind of audacious and deliberately isolating ending that could’ve so easily gone wrong, but in Cregger’s hands, it lands like a gut punch in the most affecting of ways.
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