Resident Evil (2026) In Theatres

Zach Cregger did not make the Resident Evil movie everyone expected. After Weapons turned Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys into an Oscar-winning performance, the director could probably have taken his pick of projects, only to dive headfirst into one of gaming’s most recognisable horror franchises and immediately start doing things his own way.

That naturally invited questions. Where were Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine? Why wasn’t the film adapting one of the games? Why was there so much snow? Yet the strangest thing about all those concerns is that, once Cregger’s Resident Evil gets going, it becomes obvious just how much affection he has for the games. He simply isn’t interested in recreating them.

Instead, his Resident Evil is one of the silliest, stupidest and most gleefully gruesome horror films of the year, one that had me grinning from ear to ear by the time its relatively brief runtime was over.

The franchise itself is arguably in one of its strongest periods. Since Resident Evil 7 dragged the series back towards survival horror in 2017, fans have been treated to an excellent Resident Evil 2 remake, further remakes of established classics and, more recently, Resident Evil Requiem. Yet while the modern games have often embraced grim, oppressive horror, Cregger remembers that Resident Evil has also always been incredibly stupid.

And I mean that as a compliment. In many ways, his film feels remarkably close in spirit to the original Resident Evil, warts, monsters and all.

Welcome to Raccoon City

Except for the games starring Ethan Winters, a Resident Evil adventure tends to feature some charismatic hero capable of standing between humanity and whatever biological nightmare threatens to destroy it next. Austin Abrams’ Bryan is not that.

He’s a medical courier, a coward, and a complete fish out of water who happens to be making a delivery when his night spirals spectacularly out of control. There is some early drama surrounding the possibility of him becoming a father and his attempts to avoid dealing with that responsibility, although it only occasionally resurfaces once everything starts trying to kill him. Most of the film instead follows his increasingly disastrous journey from the outskirts of Raccoon City to its beating heart as the situation around him worsens.

Fans hoping for Leon, Jill, or another established protagonist won’t get them, but Bryan’s complete lack of heroic credentials ultimately becomes one of the film’s greatest strengths. Resident Evil isn’t really interested in becoming another action movie, though it takes some time to make that clear.

The first half hour is probably the film’s weakest stretch, shifting between horror, comedy and character drama without entirely settling on what it wants to be. Eventually, everything snaps into place and Cregger firmly plants his feet in a particularly strange mixture of survival horror and pitch-black comedy. Whether that mixture works will probably depend on your tolerance for stupidity.

Once it does find its footing, however, Resident Evil barely looks back. The creatures that hound Bryan grow increasingly relentless, starting with a lone zombie pursuing him through the snow before escalating into hordes of mutated monstrosities throwing themselves at him. The gradual ramping-up of the threat is one of the movie’s best qualities; every time Bryan appears to understand the situation, something even worse emerges.

Their designs are suitably disgusting, ranging from recognisable walking corpses to warped experiments that would feel perfectly comfortable wandering the halls of an Umbrella laboratory. Better yet are Bryan’s reactions. He’ll scream, panic, run away or occasionally decide that whatever horrible thing he has just seen simply isn’t worth acknowledging before turning around and leaving. He is absolutely not Leon Kennedy.

Thank God for that.

Sometimes Stupid, Always Thrilling

The comedy will probably be Resident Evil’s most divisive element because it has a lot of extremely stupid moments. Bryan’s reactions regularly border on farce. Characters sometimes converse as though they’ve wandered into a The Whitest Kids U’ Know sketch rather than a multimillion-dollar horror movie.

Practically everyone working for Umbrella appears to be some variety of idiot. Even several of the monsters, as fantastic as they look, become inherently ridiculous the moment you stop being terrified of them. But the rule of cool operates at maximum capacity, and Cregger rarely seems interested in asking whether something makes complete sense when the more important question is whether it would be fun to watch.

Why is there a grotesquely bloated man sitting in the sewers? I’m still not entirely sure, but he looks fantastic. Did there need to be a sequence where zombies start throwing themselves off rooftops to bombard Bryan? Absolutely not, but it’s also one of the best scenes in the movie. Does the script occasionally feel disjointed? Yes. Is the story incredibly simple? Also yes.

At times, Resident Evil feels less like a carefully constructed narrative and more like Cregger came up with every ridiculous idea he’d ever wanted to put into a horror film and somehow persuaded everyone around him to let him. That devil-may-care attitude is also more faithful to Resident Evil than some may initially give it credit for.

The original game trapped players inside a mansion filled with zombies, giant spiders, mutant sharks, an enormous snake and a hulking biological weapon created in a laboratory underneath the building. This franchise has never been particularly concerned with restraint, no matter how serious individual entries may become.

Cregger understands that absurdity and doesn’t try to apologise for it. The only thing missing from making this a genuine return to the PlayStation era is intentionally awful dialogue delivery, although bringing that particular piece of history back would probably have shattered the genuinely frightening moments Cregger manages to create around all the silliness.

Yay! Video Games!

Because beneath all the jokes, Resident Evil still knows exactly when it needs to be horrible. It doesn’t take particularly long before gallons of blood start spilling and the increasingly deranged creature effects demonstrate just how badly things have gone in Raccoon City.

Once the film hits its stride, there are stretches when Bryan barely gets a chance to breathe. Every temporary refuge collapses, anyone who looks capable of helping him complicates matters further, and every apparent escape leads him toward something worse.

That constant vulnerability is crucial, as Bryan isn’t an action hero mowing through infected hordes; he’s just trying not to die. Cregger’s cinematography often exploits that helplessness by refusing to give us a clear look at everything lurking around him. Certain creatures are teased through movement, shadows, or Bryan’s horrified response rather than immediately being shoved into frame, letting the audience’s imagination do some of the work.

Even during some of the film’s most chaotic sequences, the camera can deliberately obscure exactly what is happening until Cregger decides we’re ready to see it. And this is where his understanding of Resident Evil becomes particularly obvious. Bryan eventually gets a pistol, but ammunition isn’t treated as an infinite resource, and he doesn’t suddenly transform into an unstoppable badass. Sometimes he’ll pull the gun out because he absolutely needs it. Other times he’ll convince himself this is finally his chance to look cool, usually with far less impressive results.

His growing arsenal eventually takes him from a pistol to a shotgun and later a submachine gun, with each new weapon feeling less like an action-movie power fantasy and more like the progression players naturally experience throughout the games. Sadly, nobody gives the man a rocket launcher.

The weapons are hardly the only references either. Locks have an amusing tendency to appear exactly when they are least convenient. Green herbs crop up throughout the film. Umbrella’s shadow hangs over everything. There are even first-person sequences that rank among the more convincing attempts I’ve seen at translating an actual gameplay perspective into a movie without making it feel completely obnoxious.

These aren’t just Easter eggs thrown onto the screen so somebody can point at them and shout, “Yay! Video games!” They’re part of the film’s language, and that is ultimately what makes Cregger’s approach work so well. He hasn’t taken a Resident Evil plot and filmed it. Instead, he’s borrowed its rhythms: enter an unfamiliar environment, find something useful, get chased by something horrible, escape by the skin of your teeth, acquire a better weapon and immediately discover that the monsters have become worse too.

The specifics are different, but the sensation is remarkably familiar. Cregger wasn’t brought in simply to put Leon Kennedy on the big screen and recreate scenes players already know. He has his own ideas about what Resident Evil should look and feel like, and the resulting movie is much more interesting because he’s been allowed to pursue them.

Not all of those ideas work. The opening takes too long to establish the film’s identity, the underlying story is thin, and the humour occasionally pushes so far into deliberate stupidity that some audiences are inevitably going to bounce straight off it. Yet once Bryan’s terrible night gets properly underway, those imperfections become surprisingly easy to forgive.

Resident Evil is bloody, grotesque, frightening and frequently incredibly stupid. It understands that survival horror can be terrifying without becoming relentlessly miserable, and that respecting a game does not necessarily require recreating its characters, story, or iconography beat for beat. Sometimes, capturing how something feels matters more, and on that front, Zach Cregger absolutely gets Resident Evil.

Resident Evil is now out in theatres.