Ever wonder how you would do as a protagonist in Resident Evil? This is your answer, probably.

Bryan, a courier, is tasked in delivering a medical package to a hospital in Raccoon City. While it does involve driving out into a snowstorm, Bryan senses easy money. Unfortunately, hitting a pedestrian in the blizzard escalates far worse than could be imagined.

Resident Evil (2026) is directed and co-written by Zach Cregger, who gave us Barbarian (2022) and Weapons (2025). It stars Austin Abrams (also in Weapons) and several other actors, such as Will Merrick, Sara Paxton, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser. The movie comes from PlayStation Studios, video game company CAPCOM, and Sony TriStar. That is worth noting, considering PlayStation gave us the disastrous Until Dawn, which narrowly avoided worst spot of 2025. It takes a lot to beat [redacted] okay?

So does Resident Evil push our buttons, or is it more juvenline nonsense?

The story follows Bryan (Abrams) a cocksure courier who is too wrapped up in his job to properly talk to his pregnant girlfriend on the phone. He agrees to take a job out to Raccoon City, out in the snowy mountains, despite not being best equipped. No one knows what’s in the medical case, but he is told it is urgent.
Midway through his trip, and losing cellphone signal, he crashes into someone on the road. Worried, he attempts to complete his objective and rescue the injured individual. What follows is not what he signed up for.

This movie is rather good.

The Resident Evil video game franchise was created by Japanese company CAPCOM in 1996, and remains one of the most successful horror game series around. It would be 2002 when Hollywood hired Paul W.S Anderson to create the first (of many) Resident Evil movie with Milla Jovovich. Fortunately, we can rest easy in knowing Zach Cregger’s new movie has nothing to do with that series of films. This is almost as removed as one can be.

The film is a narrow-focus story with several vignettes strung together for its structure. Not unlike Boyle’s genre-refining 28 Days Later. We follow Abrams through several bizarre encounters as he makes his way to the Raccoon City general hospital. At first, in light of the film’s already ballooning audience appreciation, I was sceptical. It felt contrived, familiar, predictable. Really nice cinematography, but that’s it. But then something happened. It was also… funny?

Horror and comedy are both subjective genres. Usually when horror becomes comedy, it isn’t to the product’s benefit. Usually, if I am laughing at a horror, it has died on the screen and will not recover. But Resident Evil is actually self-aware. It is highly attuned to what it is, but also doesn’t ruin its scares or atmosphere. It is quite astonishing what Cregger has achieved. To make some genuinely deadpan comedy work and be very scary and be somewhat creative in the genre. After all, zombie horror is perhaps the most overdone subgenre there is. This movie keeps you constantly unsure of what’s going on, constantly at odds with the world. A perfect way to sympathise with a struggling, massively under-qualified hero.

But it isn’t jeopardized by its comedy. I am not often caught off-guard by jump-scares… but this actually got me a couple of times, and we aren’t talking cheap jump-scares either. It is also very gory, bloody, and weird. Some proper icky scenarios that really answer to some of the franchise’s memorable moments. There’s even some actual iconography from the games, which got more chuckles out of me. This is exactly the sort of Resident Evil movie I’ve wanted for years.

Are there any negatives to relay? A lot of the negatives can be looped back into deliberate direction/writing choices, becoming subjective rather than objective issues. It depends what the audience wants from a Resident Evil adaptation. This isn’t taking place in a mansion. It doesn’t include any character cameos. If you are hoping for a muscular hero shooting down hordes of the undead, while jumping through the air in slow-motion… you won’t get it.
There is a moment of conveinence; where characters meet up with incredible luck. There’s many moments you will ask yourself “why did he do that??” only for the film to knowingly wink at you. It is quite difficult to think of real issues here.

I cannot wait for Sony to learn the wrong lessons from this and make a sequel that is its antithesis. It has been a long standing belief of mine that a good video game adaptation does not follow the protagonists of the game, or even the storyline. Parallel events at the same time, and in the same place, is the way to go. Make it a good movie first. Luckily for Resident Evil, Zach Cregger was the right director for the job.