“What’s the appeal of Resident Evil movies?” I asked in 2012, the one time I reviewed an entry in the six-film series based on Capcom’s apocalyptic video game. I concluded that it was about the global translatability of watching “[Milla] Jovovich in black-leather quasi-bondage gear doing acrobatics while firing her gun,” unhampered by meaningful dialogue or character development.
After an unsuccessful attempt to reboot the series in 2021, Hollywood has returned to the well with a new secret weapon: horror auteur Zach Cregger, of Barbarian and last year’s Oscar-winning Weapons. A fan of the game series, Cregger described his reboot to horror media website Bloody Disgusting last year as a “love letter” to the franchise that would be “fucking awesome.”
The deal
Young medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) isn’t having a great night. Snow is falling hard, hospital staff are rude to him, and his girlfriend (voice of Sara Paxton) wants him to come home so they can discuss the results of her pregnancy test.
Bryan doesn’t feel ready for that conversation, so he jumps on the opportunity to make an important delivery to Raccoon General Hospital for double pay. Driving through the snowy mountains, he accidentally hits a woman (Andrea Miltner) who’s wandering around in a summer dress, seemingly catatonic. Bryan seeks help from a passing cop (Johnno Wilson), but the woman brutally attacks them both, forcing Bryan to seek refuge in a nearby farmhouse. There he must fight off a guard dog who is … not quite a dog, only to learn that the house’s inhabitants have met a gruesome fate.
“It’s not real,” Bryan assures himself as he dashes from one bizarre peril to the next. But there’s trouble with a capital T, right here in Raccoon City, and the item in his delivery satchel could have something to do with it.
Will you like it?
You don’t need to be a gamer to appreciate the stripped-down storytelling of Cregger’s Resident Evil (cowritten with Shay Hatten). Events take place in close to real time. Bryan anchors every scene, and it’s best not to get attached to anyone he encounters, since other characters tend to exit promptly and horrifically.
While Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil series offered action epics crowded with lore, this is a stoner tall tale with a bemused everyman narrator. We know only what Bryan knows about the zombie-like plague afflicting Raccoon City — very little. We care only for what he cares about — his survival, but also how miserable it is to run around in wet socks.
From the opening tracking shot, which follows Bryan through busy hospital hallways, Cregger plays on the visual conventions of a third-person shooter game. But Bryan isn’t the typical seasoned, battle-ready hero. On the contrary, he bumbles around like a doomed non-player character — accidentally shooting out his own engine, foolishly tossing away equipment he needs to escape, and keeping up a muttered monologue of denial and grievance.
We like Bryan because Abrams plays him as a guileless, selfish but basically decent man-child, and we root for him because he’s ridiculously outmatched — a comedy protagonist stuck in a nightmarish survival story. The scenes in which he grapples with a Rube Goldberg-esque array of physical obstacles — padlocked gates are his special nemesis — are actually tenser than the monster attacks. And funnier, because who can’t relate?
Resident Evil has well-timed jump scares, and the early scenes in the countryside will give viewers the shivers. Once the nature of the threat is revealed, the movie shifts from minimalist spookiness into maximalist body horror mode, with impressive practical effects involving tentacles, acid vomit and buckets of blood.
The gory pageant is fun (for genre fans, anyway), but is it scary? Not terribly, and Cregger doesn’t do anything with the unsettling suggestion that the film’s villain is artificial intelligence run amok, trying to “perfect” human bodies by collaging them into new organisms. (Since 1996, the games have centered on a high-tech biohazard created by a pharmaceutical corporation.) It’s hard not to draw parallels to current fears about real-life AI, but the movie’s messaging stays on a Screenwriting 101 level. (Believe it or not, Bryan finally matures enough to get his priorities straight.)
Resident Evil is a devilishly effective thrill ride, and for many viewers, that will be more than enough. Certainly, it entertained me better than Jovovich doing The Matrix with zombies. If this movie has a theme, beyond “Don’t trust medical bureaucracy or corporate bullshit,” it’s that horror meets comedy in the realm of the absurd, where our noble, pathetic human flailing just keeps digging us deeper into cesspits of gore. Whether our hapless hero prevails or not, his doggedness is an inspiration to us all.
If you like this, try…
Evil Dead II (1987; HBO Max, Philo, YouTube Primetime, rentable): In the Bloody Disgusting interview, Cregger aptly compared his Resident Evil to Sam Raimi’s classic combination of horror and slapstick.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (2025; Disney+, Hulu, rentable): Another “apocalypse comedy” is Gore Verbinski’s underrated film about a time traveler recruiting a motley group to save humanity. If you also saw the threat in Resident Evil as artificial intelligence, you may enjoy how this movie explicitly makes AI the villain.
Weapons (2025; HBO Max, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Abrams is slyly funny as James, the vagrant burglar, in Cregger’s movie about a town terrorized by the disappearance of a class of third graders, which starts like horror and ends like dark comedy.
This article appears in September 23 • 2026.
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