Resident Evil captures the breathless terror of the games at last

Zach Cregger's Resident Evil wastes no time getting going, which is exactly what the franchise needs after so many previous installments.

Before diving in, some context helps. Resident Evil first appeared on PlayStation in 1996 and gave a name to an emerging genre: survival horror. Paul W.S. Anderson went on to direct six live-action films starring his wife Milla Jovovich. Then 2021 brought Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, led by Robbie Amell. That's separate from the roughly half-dozen CGI Resident Evil movies that function as canonical extensions of the games. Broadly speaking, the film franchise has been sliding since early in Anderson's run. Now, in 2026, the seemingly unkillable series returns, this time with Cregger — director of Barbarian and Weapons — at the helm.

The story centers on Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who drops off a package while arguing with his girlfriend on the phone. Rather than heading home to sort things out, he leaps at a high-priority delivery to Raccoon City. The package has to arrive intact, with no detours — a convenient excuse to avoid any personal issues. Bryan begins second-guessing that choice when, driving through heavy snow on a slick road in the dark, he hits a woman in a nightgown.

From that point on, Bryan is in way over his head, caught in a fight just to stay alive.

Bryan is no hero — arguably the least heroic lead any Resident Evil movie has had. That's a big reason this gross, funny, and frequently terrifying film works. He has no special forces background, and like most of us, his only gun experience comes from a video game controller.

As he swears and stumbles through this horrific night, he's easy to root for. He functions as a kind of audience stand-in, but not in the usual sense. What if you sat down to play Resident Evil for the first time and woke up inside that world? Most of us would be stuck in a panicked half-run, trying to load our last rounds with shaking hands. That's Bryan — perpetually out of breath and on the verge of a panic attack.

But Bryan never stops, and neither does the movie. Resident Evil races forward across its entire 95-minute runtime. There are no quiet stretches to breathe or reflect: it's one awful night where each disaster shoves Bryan into the next. Every time he finds something like safety, he's dragged straight back into the nightmare. It's a marathon of a movie, in the spirit of Mad Max: Fury Road and Run Lola Run.

Because of that, Resident Evil plays more as tense than scary. There are a few strong jump scares, naturally, and gore absolutely everywhere. It's also very funny. Cregger came up through the sketch show Whitest Kids U Know — good company alongside Jordan Peele and Curry Barker as sketch alumni making some of the best horror around — and he's said in interviews that he had to cut piles of jokes. Our protagonist copes with his surroundings through humor. The jokes land, but they never deflate the tension or terror. Some of the biggest laughs come when we know something terrible is coming, and I still found myself sinking into my seat when it arrived.

Resident Evil fans will find plenty to enjoy. No Raccoon Police Department officers or STARS members show up, but references are scattered throughout — things a casual viewer might notice but only fans will fully get. Even the monsters feel made by and for Resident Evil fans.

There aren't actually many zombies here, though they do help keep things moving. Rather than leaning on classic Resident Evil creatures, Cregger gives us mostly original monsters that still feel like they belong to the T-Virus lineage. Masses of arms and legs, tentacles ending in teeth, you name it. I felt right at home watching, yet the film still surprised me with gnarly, nauseating monsters around every corner.

By stepping away from the games' stories and characters, Cregger sidesteps the "that's not my Leon Kennedy" problem and lets us experience Resident Evil ourselves, through our own eyes. The campy action-movie artifice is gone, leaving a terrified guy who runs from one set of problems straight into something far worse.

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