Summary
A visually faithful, stylish and disarmingly entertaining ride that reinvents the Resident Evil franchise by simply going back to bloody basics.
Now eight films deep, the Resident Evil film franchise has rightfully earned its army of fans. For all the faults they wear on their sleeves like battle scars, the Jovovich/Anderson films somehow defy any real critical blows. Johannes Roberts’ Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City reboot nodded to the survival horror roots, but none of them really got the sheer video game terror of cautiously peeping around a corner and having the bejesus ripped out of you. At least until now.
From the opening shot, Barbarian and Weapons director Zach Cregger nods to the gaming roots with a third-person shot of medical courier Bryan (Austin Abrams) in the process of making a delivery. Tasked with an urgent drop to Raccoon City Hospital, things start to go awry on the snowy roads – and only escalate from there. Soon he’s in a fight for survival and miles from home.
Early in the film, Dariusz Wolski’s camera follows some footprints through the thick snow. I suddenly found myself craning my neck to see around the corner, having been deftly dropped in the middle of it all. When the scares come, and boy do they come, Hays and Ryan Holladay’s score is almost completely absent. It’s a series of diegetic jump scares, sounds from another room or explosive body horror suddenly manifesting before us.
Yet what might surprise viewers the most is just how funny Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten’s script is. Much like Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series, the gore is tempered with enough one-liners and dark comedy to make this play like a violent comedy of errors. It stops the film from feeling like a series of puzzles and tasks, and makes it more like a “real” person dropped in the middle of something unnatural.
Like the source material, Cregger relies on escalation to keep us locked in. This is personified in the tangle of twisted limbs that repeatedly wheels its way towards Bryan like an unnerving Katamari Damacy. The characters who appear like NPC saviours only to be just as rapidly dispatched. The explosive cascade of bodies falling like a bloody honour guard.
By the time Cregger drops his wild climax, it sits somewhere between director Stuart Gordon and King Kong, leaving us with one of the more audacious moments of a film full of them. Resident Evil aims to please the purists, but does the rare thing of being a horror film that’s both genuinely frightening and disarmingly entertaining as well.
2026 | USA | DIRECTOR: Zach Cregger | WRITERS: Zach Cregger, Shay Hatten | CAST: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser | DISTRIBUTOR: Sony Pictures Releasing | RUNNING TIME: 95 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 17 September 2026 (Australia), 18 September 2026 (USA)