The prospect of Zach Cregger directing a fresh take on Resident Evil sounded like an almost impossibly good idea. Coming hot off modern horror hits Barbarian and the Oscar-winning Weapons, Cregger seemed well suited to take a swing at one of gaming’s most gloriously grotesque horror properties. And, for a while, his Resident Evil makes a pretty convincing argument that this was exactly the right marriage of filmmaker and material.
Cregger’s Resident Evil is a refreshingly stripped-back approach to the franchise. Forget the super-soldiers versus super-monsters, high-tech gadgets and increasingly ridiculous action spectacle that defined much of the Paul W.S. Anderson series. Forget trying to cram Leon Kennedy, Jill Valentine, the Redfields, Wesker, and every other beloved game character into one movie. This is survival horror in its most basic form: an ordinary guy having an absolutely fucking terrible night.
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a friendly but somewhat bumbling medical courier who seems to already be having relationship problems when his girlfriend Michelle (Sara Paxton) tells him she might be pregnant. Bryan desperately doesn’t want a baby, but he’s also incapable of saying that out loud. So when he gets offered a last-minute, late-night delivery to Raccoon City General Hospital that pays double, he takes it instead of going home. He really should’ve just gone home.
On the snowy mountain road to Raccoon City, Bryan accidentally hits a woman (Andrea Miltnerová) with his car. Unfortunately for him, she is infected with the T-virus, and this is only the beginning of what becomes one of the worst nights imaginable. This opening stretch is undeniably fantastic.
Cregger, who wrote the screenplay alongside Shay Hatten (Ballerina, Army of the Dead), understands that part of the fundamental appeal of the Resident Evil games isn’t simply fighting zombies. It is figuring shit out. It’s opening a door and wondering what’s behind it. It’s finding a key, realizing you need another key, discovering three bullets in a drawer and immediately feeling like you just won the lottery. It’s being completely unequipped for whatever is coming next and having to improvise anyway.
Cregger’s Resident Evil translates that feeling into cinema remarkably well. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski (Nuremberg, Napoleon, Pirates of the Caribbean) sticks close behind Bryan with these wonderfully tactile, over-the-shoulder shots, occasionally giving the sense of a first-person perspective that makes the audience feel like we’re nearly controlling him ourselves. Everything becomes an obstacle, be it the weather, a police officer, a dog, a busted engine, a locked gate, or an electric fence. And Bryan is kinda terrible at maneuvering any of it.
He fumbles with guns, struggles to hit targets, gets battered and scratched and bruised, and repeatedly has to figure out some new way to keep moving. It creates an unusually convincing depiction of what it might actually feel like for a completely average person to stumble into the extremes of a Resident Evil scenario. Bryan isn’t an action hero, he’s just a dude trying desperately not to die.
Abrams (Weapons, Euphoria) is phenomenal in the role, full stop. This is largely a one-man show throughout the movie and he carries it effortlessly. Bryan is a screw-up, but he’s also fundamentally a good guy who keeps trying to help people even when every reasonable instinct should be telling him to save himself and run. Abrams makes his frustration, terror and occasional little bursts of triumph genuinely funny and endearing, making him feel all the more real. Those little victories are what make the early sections work so beautifully. Cregger understands the strange pleasure of surviving something that should have killed you.
One of the things that has always separated Resident Evil from more conventional zombie fiction is the way its virus transforms people and animals into increasingly horrific biological nightmares. Cregger and his team clearly had a wonderful time with that aspect of the mythology. The film becomes increasingly obsessed with flesh, bone, guts and mutation, producing some truly disgusting creature work. There are grotesque contortions of human bodies, horrific combinations of infected flesh, exploding organs, mutilated animals and imagery involving children and babies that goes places even hardened horror fans may find difficult to stomach.
I do appreciate the lack of restraint in that department - everything and everyone gets tossed into the gore blender in this movie. Some of this stuff is absolutely inspired. There’s a little Cronenbergian fascination with the body breaking its own rules running throughout the film, especially near the end, and the film’s creature designs are often genuinely revolting in the best possible way.
The first half might be some of the cleanest horror and suspense filmmaking of the year. Unfortunately, Resident Evil eventually starts losing the plot - literally and figuratively. Once Bryan actually reaches Raccoon City and the film expands beyond its isolated, middle-of-nowhere survival-horror premise, the tension starts giving way to monster encounters that lack teeth and increasingly uneven comedy.
This is where my particular Cregger tolerance apparently starts kicking in. Much like this latest film of his, I loved most of both Barbarian and Weapons, but I’ve noticed a similar problem: Cregger can establish an awesome premise, build an absolutely electric atmosphere around it, but then gradually lose that magic as everything keeps going and becomes bigger and louder. Resident Evil may be the clearest example yet.
The humor is particularly inconsistent. There are genuinely funny moments here, especially when Bryan realistically behaves like the completely overwhelmed guy that he is. But there are also plenty of instances of lame self-aware comedy that feel less like characters reacting naturally to an insane situation and more like a by-committee joke that sucks the air out of the room. One gag line praising video games is particularly egregious - it’s a true contender for worst of the year, almost as poorly conceived as the now infamous one from 2024’s Alien: Romulus.
It’s a shame because the film definitely doesn’t need that kind of wink. The filmmaking already communicates the connection to the source material beautifully. Cregger doesn’t have to tell us we’re playing a video game when the camera, level-like progression, limited resources, locked doors, weapons and escalating enemies have already made that abundantly clear.
There is a lot to enjoy here. The snowy nighttime setting is fantastic, the sound design is excellent, the creature work is spectacularly gross, and Cregger remains a wonderfully confident visual filmmaker. The transition from Bryan’s isolated roadside nightmare into the chaos of Raccoon City is impressive in the way it expands the scope, with the film eventually opening up into some massive and unforgettable horror set pieces.
But Resident Evil works best when it remembers that this kind of survival horror is about vulnerability. Once Bryan stops feeling like an ordinary guy desperately trying to survive and instead pivots into a seemingly unbothered quip vending machine, something really gets lost.
That makes this an admittedly strange entry in the Resident Evil movie canon. Its initial scaled-back approach is objectively awesome horror cinema, and the film as a whole understands the fundamental pleasures of the games better than any previous theatrical adaptation. It’s funny, gross, stylish and occasionally truly terrifying. But it also feels stretched thin, repetitive and increasingly frivolous as it approaches the finish line. My immersion was all but broken by the film’s disappointing end.
There is enough genuinely great filmmaking here that it’s impossible to just write Resident Evil off. That opening stretch alone is proof that Cregger knows exactly how to turn the language of a video game into genuinely engaging cinematic suspense. When he’s focused on Bryan, a flashlight, a gun with limited ammunition and whatever horrible thing is waiting around the next corner, this movie absolutely rules. I wish it had trusted that more.
Resident Evil doesn’t exactly fall apart. It simply becomes less interesting the more it evolves, which is perhaps the most frustrating possible outcome for a movie that begins with such a strong understanding of what makes survival horror so damn compelling. 'Til the next reboot.
'Resident Evil' is now playing in theaters.
