Resident Evil (2026)
An adaptation that captures the spirit of playing the videogames rather than slavishly rehashing their plots, writer/director Zach Cregger’s take on the Resident Evil series is an incredibly fun thrill ride that somehow manages to be both edge-of-your-seat scary and laugh-out-loud funny – often simultaneously.
Premise: On the same night that he learns that his girlfriend is pregnant, medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) accepts a job to rush a transplant organ to Racoon City General Hospital. However, his difficult drive through the snowy Colorado mountains is just the start of his troubles, and he soon finds himself facing mortal dangers on his quest to deliver the urgently needed medical package.
Review:
I came to this 2026 reboot of Resident Evil with a checkered personal history with the franchise, having never played any of the Resident Evil videogames (mainly because survival horror games are not really my thing) but having really enjoyed Milla Jovovich’s Resident Evil film series. I’m aware that that film series (which spanned six films between 2002 and 2017) only had a very loose connection to the videogame series – and I’m also the first to admit that two of the six films are pretty awful – but when they worked, Milla Jovovich’s Resident Evil films were a real “guilty pleasure” of mine. Four years after they ended, the studio tried to reboot the series with 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, which was in some respects a bit of a “noble failure” – it tried to be faithful to the original videogames by essentially retelling the storylines from the first two games, but the end result felt a little like watching an extended cutscene in a game that someone else is playing.
So when it was announced that the series was being rebooted again, just five years later, I wasn’t particularly excited ... until I heard who was behind this latest return to Racoon City. Writer/director Zach Cregger is one of the most exciting new directors to hit the horror scene in recent years – his debut film (2022’s Barbarian) was an inventive and twisty horror thriller that went in directions I never saw coming, and 2025’s Oscar-winning Weapons was, quite frankly, an astonishing piece of filmmaking. What’s more, this wasn’t a case of him “selling out” and being lured by a studio to make a “franchise movie” – this was Zach Cregger as a fan of the videogames going to the studio to pitch his idea for an original movie set in the Resident Evil universe.
“…encapsulates the experience of playing a survival horror game…”
And that’s exactly what 2026’s Resident Evil is – an original movie, that isn’t restrained by the plots of the games, and which doesn’t involve any of the existing characters from the series, but which still undeniable manages to capture the spirit of the videogames. The central concept at the heart of the Resident Evil series still remains (namely that the Umbrella Corporation develop a virus which escapes their lab and infects the inhabitants of Racoon City), but the story told in this film is far more personal and intimate – one person’s struggle to survive amidst the carnage and mayhem.
This approach is what makes 2026’s Resident Evil unlike any other Resident Evil movie, and also unlike almost every other zombie/infected movie, because it focuses on putting the audience in the shoes of a single character for the full 95-minute runtime. In this respect, this movie comes the closest to encapsulating the experience of actually playing a survival horror game, putting the audience in the shoes of a character who finds themselves isolated and ill-prepared, with extremely limited resources and weaponry.
“…moments of pitch-black humour release the (otherwise unbearable) tension…”
Austin Abrams is fantastic in the central role of Bryan, the out-of-his-depth medical courier who finds himself fighting for survival after an unexpected encounter on the snowy mountain road into Racoon City. Bryan is (and arguably has to be) an accessible “everyman” character, to enable him to be an effective audience proxy for the nerve-shredding odyssey that unfolds, and Austin Abrams is incredibly successful in that regard. His portrayal of Bryan is suitably flawed (we sense early on that he’s not dealing with the news of his girlfriend’s pregnancy as well as he could have), but it also sees him reacting to events in a believable fashion – whether that’s straight-up denial about what he’s seeing, or “nope-ing” his way away from obvious danger.
Bryan is also most definitely not an action hero, and much of the humour and the tension comes from his very limited combat and survival skills. His vulnerability heightens the sense of jeopardy, while his darkly comic reactions to the horrific events are the source of a lot of the film’s humour. And make no mistake, this film is very funny, with more laugh-out-loud moments that I can count – but this film also isn’t a “horror-comedy”. Instead, it’s an intense, nerve-jangling suspense horror, where moments of pitch-black humour are used to release the (otherwise unbearable) tension – and in that respect, Zach Cregger does an amazing job with the movie’s flip-flopping tone, ensuring that the horror heightens the comedy and the comedy heightens the horror, and neither element undermines the other.
“…Austin Abrams proves himself more than capable of carrying the entire movie…”
There are a few other members of the supporting cast who appear (sometimes briefly) as people that Bryan meets on his journey to deliver his medical package to Racoon City General Hospital, but they’re all little more than cameos (which I won’t spoil here), and this is unquestionably Austin Abrams’ movie from beginning to end. Bringing some of the manic energy that he brought to his performance as the drug addict James in Weapons, Austin Abrams proves himself more than capable of carrying the entire movie on his shoulders (and shows how far he’s come from playing roles like the morally ambiguous boyfriend in Do Revenge).
This reboot does have moments of action, but they’re small scale, intimate moments (a world away from the large scale or heightened action of some of the earlier Resident Evil films, or other genre movies like Zombieland, Army of the Dead or World War Z). However, the stakes are no less important, because the audience is so invested in Bryan as a character that the viewers’ anxiety levels when he has to (for example) walk into a dark tunnel are just as high as with any world-threatening scenario.
“…a 95-minute thrill ride in the truest sense…”
Yes, you could choose to focus on what this film isn’t (for example, it arguably doesn’t have much of a plot beyond “Bryan tries to survive”), but in terms of what it’s trying to be, Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is a 95-minute thrill ride in the truest sense – you'll spend the entire runtime fluctuating between edge-of-your-seat tension and bursts of cathartic dark comedy, and end the film felling exhausted but exhilarated.
