Like those infected by the various Umbrella Corporation viruses turning Raccoon City residents into zombies and fleshy Junji Ito amalgamations, Resident Evil just won’t stay dead. In the game series, that means resurrecting old favorites as myriad best-selling remakes. For its film adaptations, it means mutation, striving to meet the times. The vulgar auteurism of Paul W. S. Anderson’s epic onslaught of nonsense was first replaced by Johannes Roberts’ anodyne yet game-loyal Welcome To Raccoon City. Now Zach Cregger takes the franchise in a winningly focused direction: funnier, meaner, and, at its best moments, smaller.
Rather than turn his zombie movie into a soulless recreation of a decades-old game, or use the undead for a more classical social-message picture, Cregger’s Resident Evil is a “bad day on the job” film, where the compounding effect of injustices and slights and inconveniences snowballs into a human Katamari of murderous mutated limbs, tumbling downhill right towards a single blue-collar schmuck. Racing through this winter nightmare, from rural mountain roads to the heart of Raccoon City, the stressed-out individual in question is Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier already worked half to death by his shitty gig job (despite his life-saving cargo, he describes himself as a glorified Postmates driver).
Abrams has stolen movies like Wolfs and Cregger’s Weapons, bringing a strung-out charisma to his put-upon weasels and wiseasses, but Resident Evil is a showcase given to him freely. Bryan has some crackly, half-heard phone conversations with his girlfriend—there’s a positive pregnancy test they really should discuss, a silly screenwriterly attempt to add additional emotional stakes—but otherwise, he’s basically on his own. Sure, he briefly bumps into a couple Umbrella operatives (Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser) and scientists (led by Zach Cherry) during the film’s weakest sections, but for the most part it’s Bryan, his phone flashlight, and a series of hungry monsters.
The film’s first act, where Bryan’s quest to make one final delivery (a hospital orders a package with the highest priority designation) goes off the rails, is its most satisfying. Cregger, who co-wrote the film alongside frequent Zack Snyder scribe Shay Hatten, keeps the escalating problems inescapably linear—like a good video game, it’s so elegant that you unconsciously admire the guardrails. Bryan has a car accident on the icy route, then deals with a well-meaning cop, then trudges towards a local farmhouse for help. There’s something otherworldly and terrifying on the edges of these practical obstacles, even game-referential ones like searching through endless drawers for ammo and confronting a frustrating series of padlocks. There’s a sense that, somewhere out there, Resident Evil 2 is unfolding, but the slice we get to see is engrossing because of the same scrappy emotional realism Cregger’s put into his previous films.
That grows from Cregger’s comedy, which undermines familiar set-ups (like a hero finding a gun and boasting an immediate proficiency) to support his profane dialogue and suitably freaked-out performances. Abrams’ reactions, matching his baggy eyes and high-pitched scream, are mumbly, aggravated, sarcastic, and filled with the same kind of disbelieving vulgar filler that audience members would trot out when confronted with much less horrific problems than a dog whose face splits open into tentacles. Similarly, Resident Evil wisely understands that, if handled correctly, one zombie is far more terrifying than a horde. It’s hard to imagine what it’d be like to be chased by an endless wave of monsters, but the idea of a single frothing weirdo turning against us inside a suburban home brings the horror down to ground level.
It’s when Resident Evil sprawls away from this contained idea, heading into Raccoon City proper as Bryan’s final run of the day takes on world-altering significance, that it threatens to get away from its creator. The momentum hitches and idles, making too much time for extended riffing, unearned emotion, and embodied sub-Cronenbergian themes. The effects—which start off as sinewy, Thing-adjacent organic messes, then morph into unwieldy blobs of pixels—mimic the narrative. Immersive tactile details—like the stark, snow-covered landscape muffling the sound effects of a crashing car or a charging creature—give way to over-designed set pieces. A confident camera that swapped between coy third-person and bodycam-like perspectives loses its clarity in the escalating FX spectacle. Abrams’ magnetism and Cregger’s cynical wit persist, but as the scope grows, they’re left taking up less space.
Cregger doesn’t do well with cheesy or broadly earnest, whether that applies to heart-to-heart conversations or blockbuster-born action. His comfort zone is too clever for that. He thrives when putting together imagery that makes you lean in rather than leap back, building to venomously cathartic punchlines. There’s still so much of that in Resident Evil—in its burned-out hero, its gleeful antipathy towards children, and its almost impressionistically bleak environments—that it’s easily one of the best films to play with these particular biohazards. The 90-minute B-movie so deftly juggles gags and gross-outs that, when it’s finally boxed in by the larger demands of IP, it’s as tragic as watching a beloved character succumb to the dehumanizing effects of a virus. But that transformation wouldn’t hurt so much if we didn’t care about what we’d lost.
Director: Zach Cregger
Writer: Zach Cregger, Shay Hatten
Starring: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser
Release Date: September 18, 2026
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