Resident Evil

Reviewed by Fraser · 10 min read · Rated September 2026

I’m a couple of days late getting to this one, but I wanted to give it a proper watch before sitting down to talk about it, because this movie has arrived with a lot of very, very good hype. Zach Cregger is the guy behind Weapons, and before that, Barbarian, a one-two punch that turned him into one of the most talked about names in horror. So handing him the keys to the Resident Evil franchise was always going to raise some eyebrows. And it has. There’s been some negative chatter out there, with a lot of people feeling it doesn’t follow the Resident Evil storylines, the Raccoon City lore and the characters from the games. And here’s the thing: Cregger’s been completely upfront about that. He co-wrote this with Shay Hatten, and rather than retelling the games, it’s an all-new story running alongside the big outbreak night from Resident Evil 2. No Leon Kennedy, no Alice, no established heroes at all. Instead we get Bryan, and Cregger has described Bryan as an avatar for himself: a normal guy, and how the average player would react if they were suddenly thrust into the game.

Full disclosure from me before we go any further. As you’ve seen from my other reviews, I’m not the quickest person to reach for a horror movie, but I did really enjoy Weapons, so I was keen to see what Cregger had done here, even knowing there was probably going to be a lot more blood and guts than I’m used to. I’ll also be the first to admit I’m probably not going to pick up on a huge amount of Easter eggs. I never played any of the Resident Evil games, and out of the old movies I only ever watched the original. So this is coming at you from a total outsider’s perspective, which, funnily enough, might be exactly the audience Cregger made this for.

An Ordinary Bloke on Outbreak Night

The movie kicks off with Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, as we follow him into a hospital. He’s a medical courier, there to make his first delivery, and one thing that struck me straight away is that nobody really acknowledges him. He’s asking doctor after doctor where to drop off his package and everyone just ignores him, while in the background we’re seeing patients with some very, very nasty injuries. I wonder if that’s quietly painting a picture of what’s coming. Within the first four minutes we get our first mention of Raccoon City, when Bryan finally offloads that delivery and picks up a second one, late at night, headed straight into the heart of it. He needs the money, because he’s just found out he’s about to become a father, and that little detail does a lot of heavy lifting for the whole film. From that moment you understand exactly why this ordinary bloke keeps pushing forward through absolute hell.

And from there, the movie just goes. Bryan’s on a very icy road with no chains on his car, chatting to his girlfriend on the phone, completely unaware of what’s ahead of him. A person walks out of the forest, he clips her, and when he gets out to see what he’s hit, there’s nothing but an empty hole in the snow. He follows footsteps and blood into the trees and finds a woman who looks completely messed up, stiff like rigor mortis has set in. She’s obviously our first glimpse of the infected, but Bryan doesn’t know that. He’s just a good guy helping an injured stranger back to his car. A police officer pulls him over, the woman gets moved into the police cruiser, and as Bryan tails them towards the hospital, the cruiser swerves, dives and flips off the road. When Bryan reaches the wreck, the officer’s the only one inside. The other door is open. The woman is gone. And here’s the thing: we’re only 15 minutes in, and we’ve already got a crashed cop car and our first full zombie encounter. One of the great things about this movie is that it’s not a long movie. It’s about 90 minutes, which is unusual these days when everything seems to sail past the two-hour mark and keep going. At that length a film has to hit the ground running. There can be no filler. It has to get straight into it and just barrel along, and that is exactly what this movie does.

What makes that first fight so effective is that Bryan is hopeless. He grabs the officer’s pistol and I think the safety might be on. Look, I’ve got no idea about guns, and clearly neither does Bryan, which is exactly the point. He’s kicking, bolting, fumbling, firing wildly into the air, and in that frantic panic he actually manages to shoot his own engine. His car is dead. And that’s the Cregger thesis in one scene. Put an average person into Raccoon City on outbreak night and they don’t know what these things are or what they’re capable of. They just panic. It’s honest, it’s terrifying, and it’s frequently very funny. At 19 minutes and 50 seconds we get our first Resident Evil logo overlay, which is a fun little touch, and then the movie settles into its rhythm: Bryan spotting a farmhouse in the distance and setting off on foot with his medical bag.

The Gameplay Loop, on Film

The farmhouse stretch is where the video game DNA really kicks in, and even as someone who’s never played these games, I could feel it. Bryan is constantly using the environment. He’s chased into a barn by the property’s dog, up a ladder, using the ladder to jam the barn door, swinging down on a hook, hurting himself every step of the way. And what we think is just a really angry dog turns out to be a Raccoon City dog, because its head bursts through the barn panelling and huge tentacles shoot out of it, wrapping around Bryan and dragging him back towards it. Terrifying. Inside the house he finds a shotgun above the fireplace and goes hunting for shells, and that’s the gameplay loop right there: pick up the weapon, find the ammo, get through the door, survive to the next checkpoint. Then, from an upstairs window, he looks out over the snow-covered field towards that crashed police car, and sees the woman he shot sprinting at full speed towards the house. Okay, look, I’m not going to ruin the fun of what happens in that farmhouse. Let’s just say there are actually two people there, and it’s absolutely terrifying. The worst part is that Bryan still can’t handle a gun. He’s probably about as useless with a shotgun as I would be, so you’ve got the infected charging while he’s fumbling shells onto the floor, and that gave me more anxiety than any jump scare in the film. And what he’s left with on that floor afterwards, some kind of parasite fusing two bodies together, is one of the most disturbing images in the whole movie. But then Cregger flips it into comedy, because Bryan finds car keys, gets into a four-by-four, and is stopped by a locked farm gate. Mate. Just drive through it. You’re in a four-by-four. Instead he shoots at it, rams it, and I swear this gate is made out of some kind of vibranium from a superhero movie, because the car gets completely flipped and the gate doesn’t even budge. That balance of horror and absurdity is the film’s secret weapon, and Cregger walks that line the entire way through.

From there the movie keeps escalating. There’s a pitch-black tunnel full of abandoned cars, lit only by the tiny flashlight on Bryan’s phone, where the camera stays so tight you only ever see exactly what that beam is hitting. There’s an enormous Winnebago blocking the road, and inside it a scared little girl begging to be saved. Bryan, being a good chap, puts his gun down, which is probably the single worst thing you can do in a horror movie. I won’t go too deep into the details there, but it ends with Bryan bitten on the arm, and if we’ve watched any zombie movie since the dawn of time, we all know what a bite means. Suddenly the whole film is on a clock. He then gets picked up by two people in a car, and this is where the cast opens up beautifully. The driver, Maxine, is played by Kali Reis, who was so good in True Detective: Night Country, and the talker in the passenger seat, an Umbrella Corporation man, is the very funny Paul Walter Hauser, who’s had a fascinating run lately, from playing Mole Man in The Fantastic Four: First Steps all the way back to his brilliant turn in Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell. Hauser is the one who cracks open the lore for us, and we get a great reveal. Bryan isn’t just carrying a delivery. He’s carrying part of the cure. The final piece of the puzzle. And he still hasn’t told anyone he’s been bitten.

I’ll move quickly through the back half because so much of it deserves to be discovered fresh. There’s a giant rolling ball of bodies that chases Bryan through the streets. A human zombie ball is honestly the only way I can describe it. There’s a sewer sequence featuring a giant white blob of a thing that looks like it wandered in from Dune, and I’m going to give you the same fair warning I’d give a mate: do not be eating any food during this movie. Your stomach will thank you. And then the finale. Twenty-four flights of stairs, a sky bridge, a lift sequence involving acid that had me squirming in my seat, and a maternity ward that is probably the worst scene I’ve witnessed in a horror movie in a very long time. And I mean that as the highest compliment this genre can receive. The last 15 minutes are horrifying, gross, and an absolute blast, and I am not giving away that ending. You’ll have to watch it.

Austin Abrams Deserves a Holiday

Let’s talk about Austin Abrams, because he is absolutely brilliant as Bryan. He’s terrified, he’s clueless, he’s fumbling through every encounter, and yet you never stop rooting for him. Even late in the film, when things have gone about as wrong for Bryan as they possibly can, you’re still desperately hoping he pulls through. That’s a hard thing for an actor to earn when the character spends 90 minutes screaming and running. And can we talk about the run this poor man is on? In Weapons he played James, a junkie who did not have a good time in that movie. Now he’s Bryan, chased across Raccoon City by everything Umbrella ever cooked up. And in his next film, Whalefall, which I’ve had the pleasure of seeing at an advance screening, he’s having another shocker of a day, because he gets swallowed by a whale. That one’s directed by Brian Duffield, based on Daniel Kraus’s novel, with Josh Brolin alongside him, and I’ll be dropping that review very soon. Somebody get Austin Abrams a romantic comedy. The man has earned a holiday.

On the technical side, Cregger and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski have made something that looks incredible. The shots are nice and tight, with loads of first-person angles. When Bryan walks, we often don’t see him walking, we see his view, and that’s why the jump scares work so well, because you simply never know what’s around the corner. And there’s a very cool trick where, in total darkness, the screen takes on this faint red glow. It’s eerie, it’s distinctive, and it keeps even the blackest frames alive with dread.

So where does that leave us? This is nothing like any Resident Evil movie you’ve seen before, and I think that’s brilliant. Even as a non-gamer, I could feel that first-person, pick-up-the-weapon, get-through-the-door, point A to point B rhythm pulsing underneath everything, and it’s beautifully done. It’s short, it gets straight to it, and it never lets up. I’m not usually one for gory horror, and I still had a thoroughly entertaining time.

But look, that’s just how Resident Evil landed for me. Entertainment is subjective, and if you’re a lifelong fan of the games who wanted Leon Kennedy and the classic storylines, I completely understand if this reimagining rubs you the wrong way. What works for me may not work for you, and that’s completely okay. For my money though, this is the most fun I’ve had being terrified in a cinema all year.