Zach Cregger, who brought us ‘Weapons’ last year, takes on the video-game adaptation with ‘Resident Evil’, and what’s immediately interesting is how audaciously he approaches it.

Rather than simply trying to reproduce the experience of playing the game, Cregger seems to ask a more intriguing question: what would actually happen if an ordinary person found himself inside one?

Our protagonist is essentially a delivery man carrying precious medical cargo needed for an operation. In that respect, there’s an obvious parallel with ‘Runner’: somebody has a package, somebody’s life potentially depends upon it arriving, and our hero doesn’t necessarily know everything about what he’s transporting.

A breach at a biotech laboratory provides the backdrop as our protagonist encounters an infected woman without initially understanding what he’s looking at. Gradually he begins to realize that something has gone catastrophically wrong. By which point, of course, he’s already in far too deep.

There’s something of ‘After Hours’ about the whole thing. An ordinary person finds himself outside his normal environment and discovers that virtually every decision he makes only plunges him further into trouble. Each attempt to escape simply produces another nightmare. Except here the nightmare includes monsters.

What I particularly enjoyed is that Cregger doesn’t turn his protagonist into the sort of action hero these films normally require. He’s hopeless. Indeed, there’s almost a sense that he’s a video-game character being controlled by somebody who has absolutely no idea how to play the game. He makes the wrong decisions. He goes in the wrong direction. He fails to understand danger until it’s practically standing in front of him.

Rather than becoming progressively more competent as the threats escalate, he remains spectacularly out of his depth. And that’s an interesting reversal of the survival movie.

Usually, an ordinary character thrown into extraordinary circumstances discovers previously unsuspected reserves of courage and ingenuity. By the end, the ordeal has transformed them. But does that remotely happen here? Perhaps ‘Resident Evil’ is an anti-‘Odyssey’.

The traditional journey narrative gives us somebody who undergoes trials, learns from them and eventually emerges changed. Cregger seems much more interested in the possibility that experience doesn’t necessarily make us wiser. Sometimes you go through hell and remain exactly the same idiot you were when you entered it.

That’s also a clever way of adapting a video game. When we play ‘Resident Evil’, we control the character. We know there’s probably something unpleasant behind the next door. We learn the rules, improve our tactics and, if we die, simply try again.

But imagine being the character. Imagine having no idea that you’re supposed to avoid that corridor, conserve that weapon or recognize that apparently harmless person as infected. Suddenly the conventions of the game become absurdly frightening.

There’s also something appealingly perverse about making a ‘Resident Evil’ film about a loser. He isn’t the coolest person in the room, the best fighter or the person who understands the conspiracy before everybody else. He’s just the unfortunate man who happened to be carrying something important when the world went mad.

And perhaps that’s why the survivalism works. We’re not watching somebody who seems genetically designed to survive a zombie apocalypse. We’re watching somebody who might conceivably react as badly as most of us would.

Underneath the biotech laboratories, infected humans and monsters, then, ‘Resident Evil’ becomes a rather strange character study. Cinema has trained us to expect journeys to mean something. The protagonist faces adversity, overcomes it and emerges a better person. Cregger seems rather less convinced. Perhaps surviving isn’t the same thing as growing. Perhaps trauma doesn’t automatically confer wisdom. And perhaps being the protagonist of the story doesn’t necessarily make you the hero.

That’s what makes this ‘Resident Evil’ surprisingly interesting. It takes the logic of the video game and imagines what it might feel like from the other side of the controller. And if this really is an anti-‘Odyssey’, our hero isn’t travelling through hell in order to discover himself. He’s mostly just trying to find the exit.