The actor who plays doomed courier Bryan says he never expected Zach Cregger to let his character die and turn into a monster.
Spoiler warning: this piece discusses the ending of Zach Cregger's Resident Evil.
Austin Abrams didn't see it coming either. The actor plays Bryan, a medical courier whose single bad night spirals into a full-blown outbreak in Cregger's new Resident Evil film, and by the end of it, Bryan doesn't make it out human. He's infected, he turns, and the guy the entire film has followed becomes one of the monsters.
Abrams told The Hollywood Reporter he'd read that outcome on the page long before he processed it as a viewer might. "I thought it was crazy and shocking when I first read it," he said, adding that he's since had time to sit with it. What stuck, he said, was Cregger's willingness to actually follow through.
"You follow this one guy the whole time, so hopefully you're enjoying watching him and rooting for him," Abrams said. "Then to have him not make it is really risky and gutsy, which is what I love about all of Zach's work."
His bigger point was about the genre generally. Abrams argued that a lot of modern horror flinches right before the gut-punch, killing off a beloved character only to soften the blow somehow, a line, a flashback, a hint that it's not really over. Older films didn't bother with the cushion. "We're here to feel, man," he said. "We're here to go through something."
That's the bet Cregger's Resident Evil is making, and so far it's paying off. The film has reportedly set a franchise box office record on its opening run, and reviews out of the gate have leaned rave. JoBlo's Chris Bumbray called it one of the more exciting films he's seen in a while, praising Cregger for cramming what felt like multiple movies' worth of action and gore into a lean ninety-five minutes.
Cregger, coming off Barbarian and Weapons, has built a reputation on exactly this kind of swerve, the film that seems to be going one way and then isn't. Killing your protagonist and turning him into the thing he was running from is about as blunt a version of that trick as exists, and it's clearly split audiences between people who feel cheated and people who think it's the only honest ending a story like this could have.
Abrams, for what it's worth, is firmly in the second camp. Whether the rest of the audience settles there too is still playing out in theatres and on social timelines, where the ending has become the thing everyone wants to argue about first. No franchise sequel has been announced, and with Bryan gone, whatever comes next will have to find its story elsewhere.
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