under review

Resident Evil (2026), by Zach Cregger. Constantin Film.

Having been a long-time fan of the franchise, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the release of Cregger’s film adaptation of Resident Evil. I finally had the opportunity to watch the movie last night and absolutely loved it, as did other viewers in my theatre.

This movie follows Bryan (played by Austin Abrams), a medical courier, on a ride to deliver precious cargo to Racoon City General Hospital. After leaving his starting point, Bryan doesn’t get far before the night takes a turn for the worse. Nonetheless, he makes painstaking efforts to fulfil his delivery to the city among the infected and danger in hopes of ending the night in the comfort of his girlfriend. Will he get there?

Should you be fortunate enough to have stumbled upon this and not yet seen the movie, I encourage you to do so! If so, don’t read ahead to the next section, as I’ll be going into a spoiler-heavy review of the movie. If you’re swiumish or don’t mind spoilers, continue ahead.

Watching Ahead

The movie begins with Bryan talking to his girlfriend, Michelle, on the phone, where she shares the news that she is pregnant. He’s making his way to drop off a medical package to a nearby hospital before he meets Michelle back at home to discuss their options, where he shares his thoughts on potentially aborting the baby.

Upon his arrival at the hospital, he agrees to deliver a high-priority package outline of his perimeters to Racoon City General Hospital, which entails extra cash and a longer buffer before having to return home. As his drive starts, Bryan, clad in a wool, sheep-themed cap and no tire chains, glides across the icy road and hits a woman who seemingly walked into the car’s path with an outstretched hand. Bryan aims to bring the injured woman along with him to the hospital before a police officer pulls him over. The officer agrees to escort Bryan along the way, but minutes later, the injured woman makes the cop car roll off the road.

The officer is dead, and the woman is set on Bryan as her next target. A struggle ensues — between Bryan and the woman, and Bryan and the officer’s handgun — before he shoots her in the chest and heads to a nearby house atop a snowy hill. Along the way, Bryan encounters mutant dogs and another crazed man who is seemingly not in their right mind. Upon shooting both the man and the injured woman (again), we see the first instance of an amalgamation (see the screen grab on the above trailer for a sense of what that looks like): similar to mutants that appear across the games. In the movie, when infected individuals are shot or damaged, long fleshy tendrils and tentacles erupt from their bodies to pull other nearby infected together, fusing them into a monster made of combined limbs and flesh; this monster in particular will chase Bryan across all of Raccoon City for the rest of the movie.

From the house, Bryan continues on foot to the city. This is where he’s ultimately bitten by a young girl who is on the cusp of mutating, having been bitten on the foot by her mother not too long ago. Bryan ultimately kills the girl and continues to make his way to the hospital, now knowingly having the virus in his system.

Just after this is when Bryan hitches a ride from two folks who work for Umbrella, and it’s now that Bryan realizes that he’s not delivering any organs to the hospital, but actually a neutralizing agent to the virus, which scientists will use to create an antidote to the virus. Bryan’s delivery now entails greater significance to his own salvation, and he eagerly continues to make his way to the destination.

After evading a bile mutant, crossing through an infected maternity ward, and finally defeating the grotesque amalgamation, Bryan makes it to the 28th floor of Raccoon City General Hospital, where scientists quickly begin working on an antidote with the couriered neutralizer. Bryan had just come to terms with wanting to start a family with Michelle. However, in Resident Evil-fashion, Bryan ends up turning into an infected just as the scientists complete the sample. His last words are pleas for the scientists to inject him, but his tendrils and mutated limbs act on their own accord, violently killing almost everyone in the lab and absorbing their flesh, making him an amalgamation of his own. Just as the final scientist struggles to inject Bryan with the antidote, you see his eyes lose life as the virus completely takes over his body. The antidote is thrown over the side of the dilapidated hospital bridge, and the film ends in a close-up on Bryan’s mutated form, closely resembling Dr. William Birkin’s G-Virus transformation from the Resident Evil 2 game.

Dr. William Birkin, Resident Evil 2 (1998), post-G-Virus infection.

Final Thoughts

Resident Evil is a fun and entertaining adaptation of the beloved franchise. Unlike the movies that use Alice (Milla Jovovich) to move their stories forward, this installment uses humor to its advantage. I’ve seen some viewers online criticize the excessive use of comedy, but I disagree. Cregger does a good job of blending the horrific and the comedic here, and Abrams’s naturally charming demeanor only complements the film’s overall vibe. In fact, I don’t think any other actor would have served Bryan’s character quite as well as Abrams, and Cregger seems to agree.

Having already worked together on the film Weapons (2025), Cregger knew that he wanted Abrams as his protagonist in the video game adaptation. In an interview with The Playlist, Cregger shared, “While we were shooting ‘Weapons,’ I knew he was the guy… Everything he was doing was what I needed from my lead in ‘Resident Evil,’ so I started thinking about him for it while we were on set. There was never really a decision. I didn’t go through a list of other actors. By the time ‘Resident Evil’ became real, it was just, ‘Let’s go.’”

Cregger’s casting was on point, as was the sound design and special effects of the movie, both of which truly built up the tension of action-packed and horrific parts of the film. As recorded on the Art of VFX website, instead of relying entirely on green screens or pure CGI, Cregger had physical puppets and practical creature builds engineered on-set (such as their massive 2,000-pound sewer creature puppet) so the actors had a real physical presence to react to. For the wormy, erupting t-Virus tendrils and mutative growths, the practical builds and prosthetic armatures were photographed live on set to give the lighting and textures a realistic foundation, with digital VFX (supervising producer Alessandro Ongaro and teams like Weta) stepping in during post-production to fluidly animate and extend the writhing tentacle movements.

While I loved Austin Abrams’s portrayal of Bryan, I also appreciated that he did not survive the events of the movie. The T- and G-Viruses are virtually inescapable, and having Bryan—a medical courier with no shooting or formal fighting experience—avoid infection in a city only hours after the outbreak would have felt silly and unrealistic. Even more importantly, the movie doesn’t attempt to replicate any particular game, but instead acts as “a love letter to the games,” per Cregger.

Before Bryan’s intersection with the T-Virus, however, he faces a different kind of threat: the possibility of becoming a father. Charming but also seemingly irresponsible and childish, Bryan’s initial response to Michelle’s conversation about having a child is to avoid it entirely. He runs away, insisting that this courier trip is absolutely necessary, essentially using it to buy himself more time before confronting what he knows is inevitable.

While Bryan’s death is obviously sad, I found it interesting that a young girl is the one who delivers the infection to him as he is simultaneously reckoning with the possibility that he will soon become a protective father figure himself. There’s something especially fitting and tragic about Bryan’s story ending at the exact moment when he is beginning to confront the responsibility of caring for someone else.

This is certainly the best video game movie adaptation I’ve seen in a long time (don’t even talk to me about Return to Silent Hill…). While I provide an overview of the movie above, I’ve tried not to explicitly outline every detail of the movie. I hope this encourages you to try watching it! And if you do, let me know what you think below.