Resident Evil

After establishing himself as one of the most unpredictable filmmakers in contemporary horror cinema with Barbarian and Weapons, Zach Cregger takes an unexpected detour into the world of a well-established franchise with Resident Evil. On paper, revisiting a franchise that has already inspired seven live-action films hardly seems like the boldest move for a director whose reputation rests on his ability to surprise audiences. Yet this latest adaptation of Capcom’s famous video game series demonstrates that creative freedom can be more valuable than strict fidelity to familiar characters. Rather than reviving Alice’s adventures or attempting yet another faithful recreation of the original games, Zach Cregger and his co-writer Shay Hatten craft a standalone nightmare that captures the vulnerability, frustration, and unpredictable thrills of survival horror. Released in September 2026, this 94-minute film abandons the increasingly over-the-top action spectacle associated with Paul W. S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich in favor of an approach that is both more intimate and more off-the-wall. The result is a macabre, playful, and often exhilarating experience, even if its unwavering commitment to absurdity sometimes prevents its most unsettling ideas from reaching their full dramatic potential. 

At the heart of this descent into biological madness is Bryan, a medical courier portrayed with remarkable comedic precision by Austin Abrams. Already grappling with the news of his girlfriend’s pregnancy, Bryan accepts a lucrative last-minute assignment to transport a mysterious medical package to Raccoon City General Hospital. Unfortunately, his determination to make a little extra money proves stronger than his common sense, especially when he ventures onto snow-covered mountain roads without the necessary equipment. An encounter with a strangely behaving pedestrian quickly turns an ordinary delivery into a catastrophic journey into the heart of an ever-worsening epidemic. What sets this story apart from countless other zombie tales is the near-total absence of traditional heroism. Bryan has neither military training nor exceptional survival instincts. He struggles with firearms, misreads obvious threats, and repeatedly discovers that helping strangers can have disastrous consequences. His instinctive reactions—oscillating between panic, irritation, and desperate attempts at humor—lend the film an endearing human dimension. Austin Abrams understands that Bryan becomes interesting precisely because he is so ill-equipped to handle the circumstances. His nervous expressions, clumsy movements, and increasingly exhausted disbelief transform a protagonist who could have been ordinary into someone whose survival truly matters.

The film’s greatest achievement lies in its remarkably clever adaptation of video game mechanics into a cinematic narrative. Instead of filling the screen with recognizable characters or explanatory references, Zach Cregger recreates the physical experience of navigating a hostile environment with limited resources. Every locked door becomes an unexpected challenge, every unfamiliar building harbors potential danger, and every newly discovered weapon offers a sense of relief that rarely lasts. Bryan makes his way through isolated farms, abandoned vehicles, underground passages, and increasingly contaminated urban areas, as if he were advancing through a particularly ruthless campaign. The camera often stays close behind him, recreating the claustrophobic perspective associated with modern Resident Evil games without sacrificing the visual possibilities of cinema. This approach is particularly effective during the long opening sequence, when a deserted winter landscape gradually reveals itself to be anything but safe. The audience often senses the danger before Bryan does, creating a deliciously uncomfortable tension between anticipation and helplessness. Even the smallest physical obstacle takes on immense significance when failure could mean immediate death. In this regard, the film captures a fundamental aspect of survival horror: true suspense doesn’t necessarily require a gigantic monster, but only a vulnerable individual unable to find the right way out.

Visually, Resident Evil benefits from the work of cinematographer Dariusz Wolski, whose compositions lend the film an unexpected elegance beneath its layers of blood and mutilation. Snow-covered roads, isolated buildings, and abandoned hallways become settings of unsettling beauty, while the flashes of emergency lights create striking contrasts with the darkness. The film’s production history offers an interesting behind-the-scenes detail: despite its undeniably American setting, principal photography took place largely in Prague between October 2025 and January 2026. The Czech filming locations contribute to the strangely off-kilter atmosphere of Raccoon City, a familiar fictional destination that nevertheless seems, in some ways, geographically unrecognizable. Equally impressive is the soundtrack, which transforms the sounds of distant movements, artificial breathing, and sudden bursts of violence into essential tools of suspense. The electronic compositions by Ryan Holladay and Hays Holladay reinforce the feeling of being trapped in an environment where the rules are constantly changing, while editor Joe Murphy maintains the film’s impressive narrative momentum. Here, technical prowess rarely becomes an end in itself; nearly every stylistic choice serves the immediate, physical experience of Bryan’s increasingly desperate journey. 

The creature design is another major draw, pushing the franchise’s biological experiments into a grotesque universe reminiscent of John Carpenter’s imagination when it comes to practical special effects and David Cronenberg’s body horror nightmares. Infected humans are just the beginning of a bestiary that includes animals transformed into tentacled predators, bodies fusing into anatomically impossible combinations, and creatures capable of dissolving their surroundings with corrosive fluids. A particularly memorable encounter involving a seemingly ordinary dog illustrates the director’s talent for playing with expectations: a threat that is initially recognizable becomes, in a matter of seconds, something profoundly unnatural. Elsewhere, a mass of fused human remains transforms the familiar image of a zombie chasing its prey into an almost abstract sculpture of moving flesh. These transformations are unsettling not only because of their graphic violence, but also because they erase the boundaries separating individual bodies. There is something truly unsettling about seeing human anatomy become an infinitely adaptable substance. Nevertheless, Zach Cregger frequently breaks up the horror with deliberately ridiculous reactions, making this film as much a descendant of the anarchic sensibility of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead as it is of traditional zombie cinema. The combination works wonderfully when the comedy emerges naturally from the terror, even if the repeated escalation of bodily destruction sometimes makes even the most elaborate mutations seem less shocking than they deserve to be.

The supporting characters provide welcome respites from Bryan’s largely solitary ordeal. Paul Walter Hauser brings his signature blend of warmth and suspicious eccentricity to an Umbrella Corporation employee whose appearance introduces a more explicitly conspiracy-theory-driven dimension to the unfolding disaster. Kali Reis provides an effective contrast as Maxine, an armed agent whose competence makes Bryan’s helplessness all the more striking. Zach Cherry also contributes to the film’s distinctive institutional atmosphere, where scientific authority offers little assurance that anyone truly understands the consequences of the outbreak. Yet these characters reveal one of the script’s limitations: they often serve more as temporary guides, obstacles, or sources of information than as fully realized characters. Their appearances mirror the rhythm of encounters with non-playable characters in a video game, but what seems perfectly natural in an interactive adventure can become frustrating in a feature film. There is an intriguing world beyond Bryan’s immediate perspective—particularly regarding Umbrella’s activities and the human cost of its experiments—that remains largely unexplored. This deliberate limitation helps drive the narrative forward but sacrifices opportunities for greater emotional complexity. The decision to exclude established heroes such as Leon Kennedy and Jill Valentine ultimately proves justified, even though a stronger supporting cast could have lent more weight to this original story.

Beyond its grotesque entertainment value, Resident Evil also offers a surprisingly coherent reflection on responsibility and the fear of adulthood. Bryan’s hesitation about fatherhood isn’t merely a convenient character trait; it subtly shapes the nightmare surrounding him. His repeated attempts to protect vulnerable strangers, his confrontations with corrupted domestic spaces, and the increasingly disturbing images associated with childhood and motherhood all suggest that this is a young man facing responsibilities he desperately wants to push away. The hospital sequences make this connection particularly unsettling, transforming a place associated with healing and new life into a grotesque monument dedicated to uncontrolled biological reproduction. What begins as a relatively mundane disagreement between two people about their future turns into an absurd confrontation with a world where creation itself has become monstrous. This thematic connection is more compelling when it remains implicit than when the screenplay insists on directly articulating Bryan’s feelings. Unfortunately, the final act also reveals the limitations of the film’s approach. As the grotesque spectacle intensifies, certain jokes become too repetitive, the emotional stakes lose their sharpness, and the denouement struggles to match the inventiveness of the earlier scenes. The abrupt conclusion may be in keeping with the director’s mischievous personality, but it leaves a lingering impression that an otherwise carefully constructed adventure has run out of dramatic twists.

Zach Cregger has managed to create something that’s becoming increasingly rare in franchise cinema: an adaptation that honors its source material without letting nostalgia dictate every creative decision. His Resident Evil isn’t the definitive cinematic exploration of the Umbrella Corporation’s mythology, nor does it fully resolve the tension between genuine horror and over-the-top comedy. What it does offer, however, is an extremely entertaining demonstration of how the sensations evoked by a video game can be translated into a distinct cinematic language. Austin Abrams stands out as the film’s standout asset, brilliantly embodying an extraordinary blend of physical comedy, anxiety, and vulnerability without ever turning Bryan into a conventional action hero. The director’s affection for the subject isn’t conveyed through excessive references, but through his understanding of what makes survival horror so captivating: uncertainty, ingenuity, isolation, and the exhilarating relief of escaping from a seemingly impossible situation. 

Even though a more polished conclusion and greater attention to the supporting characters could have elevated the film even further, its visual imagination, energetic direction, and delightfully repulsive monsters make it one of the franchise’s most unique film adaptations. Resident Evil may not always be scary, but it’s consistently inventive, often hilarious, and gloriously repulsive. Above all, it reminds us that the best adaptations don’t just reproduce what audiences already know. They rediscover why these worlds fascinated us in the first place.

Resident Evil
Directed by Zach Cregger
Written by Zach Cregger, Shay Hatten
Based on Resident Evil by Capcom
Produced by Robert Kulzer, Zach Cregger, Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, Victor Hadida, Carter Swan, Asad Qizilbash
Starring Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser
Cinematography : Dariusz Wolski
Edited by Joe Murphy
Music by Hays Holladay, Ryan Holladay
Production companies : Columbia Picture, Constantin Film, Davis Films, Subconscious, Vertigo Entertainment, PlayStation Productions
Distributed by Sony Pictures Releasing (United States), Metropolitan FilmExport (France)
Release dates : September 15, 2026 (Los Angeles), September 16, 2026 (France), September 18, 2026 (United States)
Running time : 94 minutes

Viewed on September 23, 2026, at the Gaumont Disney Village, Theater 4, Seat A18