Resident Evil (2026)

A frustrating mix of horror, gore and comedy.

Note: This review was originally posted on Taste of Cinema, and can be viewed here. Zach Creggar returns to our screens just a year after the impressive Weapons (2025), a film that bettered, in almost every way, the hugely frustrating Barbarian (2022), a view that only I seem to take. Barbarian’s set-up was intriguing for about half an hour or so before it succumbed to some rather dull genre tropes and lapsed completely into a final stretch of increasingly overblown silliness. Weapons was a far more interesting beast; a film that kept you hooked with its central premise and sustained an atmosphere of menace right up until its rather foolish ending.

For his latest, Creggar offers up a second reboot of Resident Evil, an adaptation of the video game that has already spawned a six film franchise and the 2021 failed attempt at kick-starting the story once more, Johannes Roberts’s Welcome to Raccoon City. To suggest we don’t need another Resident Evil film seems irrelevant. But there was plenty of reason to be optimistic for Creggar’s arrival behind the camera. He’s a self-professed fan of the games and has expressed his desire to replicate the experience of the game without directly adapting any of its stories, a move that’s certainly sensible in its effort to draw in film fans in general, not just die-hard fans of the games or film franchise.

Creggar’s film is a ninety-minute sojourn into the depths of hell, set mostly on the outskirts of Racoon City. Austin Abrams stars as Bryan, a hapless courier who postpones the end of his night shift and an impending difficult conversation with his girlfriend to take one last night-time run, delivering urgent medical supplies to Raccoon City General Hospital and getting paid double in the process. Naturally, his destination takes him through snow-covered mountains, and once on his way, he hits a woman with his vehicle who appears to be in some bizarre form of rigour mortis yet still alive.

We all know what’s going on, and from this moment on, Resident Evil is a survival horror thriller that doesn’t stop for breath as Bryan frantically tries to make his way to the hospital. Unsurprisingly, the package he’s carrying contains the vital ingredient that will complete the antidote to this horrific virus that we soon see mutating all over the place. The woman who Bryan hits becomes several people joined together as the film goes on, and there’s plenty here for fans of the games to sink their teeth into, quite literally in some cases.

There’s an excellent pulsing score that rampages through Resident Evil, composed by Hays and Ryan Holladay, which is hugely effective and instantly puts you in the mood at the film’s opening, and is consistently present throughout. Abrams is conflictingly lovable yet progressively vexing, a character who takes the idea of blatant on-screen stupidity and multiplies it by ten. Poor decisions taken by him are deliberate, and while initially amusing, get tired very quickly. Even by a classic horror film’s genre tropes, Resident Evil stretches the point.

The critical response to the film has been mostly positive, and it’s already been something of a box office hit. Which is great for the franchise, and great for Creggar. And it’s hard to argue that this might well be the Resident Evil film that fans have been waiting for. But for everyone else, it’s hard to see what surprises are waiting for you here, beyond the constant jump scares and admittedly formidable gore- there are one or two sequences that are genuinely nasty, and one in a maternity ward is particularly grim.

Creggar cites the Evil Dead franchise as a major touchpoint, and you can see the influence throughout Resident Evil, in particular Evil Dead 2 (1987). Successfully creating the formula to blend horror and comedy in a film is notoriously difficult, and Sam Raimi is arguably the master. Creggar does his best, and for twenty minutes or so, such a combination seems to have found some sort of foothold. But it swiftly becomes a chore to listen to constant quips amid the madness unfolding around you. Of course, we’re not expected to believe anything that’s happening, when Bryan starts complaining about the state of his socks, it’s hard not to roll your eyes.

Some of the monsters on display are effectively gruesome, and Creggar admirably succeeds in creating one of the most video game-inspired cinematic experiences we’ve ever seen in terms of visual aesthetics. If you think of something like Andrzej Bartkowiak’s mostly dreadful Doom (2005), the final stretch of the film was quite literally a CGI video game that audiences watched, slack-jawed, as Karl Urban’s John Grimm shot at monsters from a video game first-person perspective. There are a couple of very brief moments where we get the exact same camera shot from Bryan’s point of view here, and Resident Evil could easily have done without them.

When comparing Creggar’s Resident Evil to previous video game adaptations specifically, things look a whole lot more favourable. It’s scant pickings to find such films that are worth your attention; indeed, the best of the lot remains Duncan Jones’s Warcraft (2016), a genuinely solid and entertaining film that flopped so badly on release that a planned sequel was dead before it got going. And yet we’re likely to see a third film in the Super Mario franchise in the next few years due to the huge success of the desperately dull Super Mario Galaxy Movie earlier this year. But then again, maybe such comparisons are unfair; Resident Evil, perhaps, should only be pitted against previous instalments of its own franchise, and in that respect, it’s impossible to argue that it’s not one of the best.

While Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2002 original film maintains its defenders, and one could put up a good defence that it’s a solid, stripped-back sci-fi B-movie, something that Anderson was already a dab hand at producing, having helmed 1997’s rather terrific Event Horizon. Since the 2002 Resident Evil, the films have ranged from average to dreadful. The odd one out being 2012’s Retribution, which, whilst being far from a great film, demonstrated an interesting exploration of visual style and personal identity, if you looked hard enough beneath the surface.

Creggar’s film certainly upsets the apple cart of distinct averageness that has permeated this franchise since its inception, and that’s likely more than enough to jolt it back into life. Indeed, this will surely do very well amongst fans, and inevitably lead to a sequel. Resident Evil is very well made, well acted, and it’s easy to see why people might have a blast with it. But whether that’s enough is very much down to personal opinion.

For about twenty minutes, Resident Evil hints at the promise of its teaser trailer: pure terror pockmarked with moments of genuine comedy. It’s undeniable that this may well work for most. But once you realise that the horror isn’t scary and the comedy stops becoming funny, the whole thing, regrettably, becomes tiresome. Ultimately, for all its positives, Creggar’s Resident Evil is a frustrating experience. ★★½ 5.9/10