Resident Evil

For many Resident Evil fans, the noughties film franchise starring Milla Jovovich will always be the video game’s defining big-screen adaptation. The first sans-Jovovich Resident Evil flick, 2021’s Welcome to Raccoon City, was a spectacular flop. But as the man behind the Oscar-winning box office hit Weapons, Zach Cregger injects a unique perspective into the brand. The result is an enjoyably frenzied, albeit painfully self-aware, survivalist horror.

Despite being added to the lengthy canon of recent IP-regeneration, the film scraps the video game’s iconic characters entirely and introduces a brand-new protagonist, Bryan (Austin Abrams). A humble medical courier with a pregnant girlfriend at home, he’s sent to deliver a package to Raccoon City General Hospital. The film is largely a one-man show, with Bryan fending off zombies and their grotesque mutations while determined to get the package delivered. Abrams is unwaveringly likeable as an ordinary guy who has to unlearn his people-pleasing tendencies as his very humanity is at stake.

It’s at its best when focused more on ambience and less on pay-off. Use of diegetic sound effects, such as boots thudding in the snow and windshield wipers squeaking, are particularly impactful. But as the film progresses, those aforementioned magical touches are eschewed in favour of predictable jump scares. It does deliver on the gore, and then some. Scenes of increasingly stomach-churning mutations veer into body horror, occasionally Human Centipede-esque, territory.

This is a picture for video game fans rather than cinephiles. Bryan notes – multiple times – that his predicament is just like being in a video game. That’s not the only meta moment; easter eggs, including a typewriter, are dotted throughout the film, showing how video game fans are increasingly dictating box office success. While Cregger offers a fresh spin on the popular franchise, and the results are at times genuinely evocative, it would have worked better as an original horror movie without clinging to the coattails of its source material.

But then, one can’t blame the filmmakers for attaching the Resident Evil brand, particularly in an industry reliant on IP that has been resurrected more times than the flesh-eating mutants terrorising lowly Bryan. And seeing how the horror of Raccoon City plays out in an everyman scenario is undoubtedly intriguing, with the broodingly atmospheric tension reminding one why Cregger gained his horror auteur stripes. His effort is nothing if not an admirable experiment in subverting the video game-adaptation tradition.

Antonia Georgiou

Resident Evil is released nationwide on 18^th September 2026.

Watch the trailer for Resident Evil here: