by Liam Ryan '27 on October 22, 2026
A&E - Film & TV
It’s hardly surprising that when someone hears about a video game being adapted into a movie, their reaction is usually one of skepticism at best or disgust at worst. Historically speaking, most such adaptations have failed to capture the spirit of the source material. Some, like Borderlands (2024), are regarded as offensively bad. Others, like Uncharted (2022), are seen as fine but painfully generic, achieving commercial success while leaving little cultural imprint. To date, the seven previous cinematic adaptations of the Resident Evil series, though cult favorites for a select few, have straddled the line between these two unfortunate categories. In Resident Evil (2026), director Zach Cregger and his collaborators avoid these pitfalls, delivering a lean, kinetic adaptation that does the long-running horror series justice. Beyond the film itself, the movie firmly establishes Cregger as a director viewers should expect to be a regular in cinema going forward.
Resident Evil’s protagonist is Bryan, a medical courier portrayed by actor Austin Abrams. Abrams, who previously worked with Cregger in Weapons, is consistently at the film’s center as his character unexpectedly becomes responsible for delivering a component crucial to ending an incipient zombie apocalypse. His expletive-laden performance provides levity as Bryan navigates a series of obstacles on the way to completing his mission. Bryan rarely interacts with other humans throughout the movie, which conjures the sense of isolation present in several of the series’ video games. Starting as a totally inexperienced outsider who accidentally hits a suspiciously monster-like wanderer in the road, Bryan becomes increasingly resourceful as he reckons with conjoined monsters, hordes of sewer rats, and vomit-spewing mutants. Abrams’ nervous energy makes Bryan an effective stand-in for the audience, constantly reassuring himself and expressing his disbelief at the increasingly bizarre circumstances he finds himself enduring. Other notable performances in Resident Evil are comparatively brief, but Paul Walter Hauser and Severance star Zach Cherry make the most of their limited screen time.
However, it is Cregger’s direction that elevates the movie from good to one of the best big-screen video game adaptations in recent memory. The horror chops he developed while making his previous two hit films, Barbarian and Weapons, manifest in Resident Evil’s constant sense of momentum. Each creature in the film moves in a distinct, horrifying way, from zombie dogs breaking through barns to rolling balls of conjoined limbs. The chase scenes that worked so effectively in Weapons also return here, with Cregger demonstrating a knack for filming them in a frantic, fast-paced fashion conducive to building suspense. In the movie’s third act, as Bryan is tasked with climbing a seemingly endless number of floors at the Raccoon City Hospital, Cregger appropriately imbues the film’s cinematography with a dread-inducing sense of verticality. The viewer gets the feeling that, at any moment, the ceiling above Bryan could collapse or a horrific tentacled creature might poke its head through a ceiling tile. His use of darkness to shroud Bryan’s environment and selectively reveal key surroundings through tactile
light sources like headlights, flashlights, and gunfire, creates oppressive shadows that make Raccoon City appear all the more terrifying.
In terms of shortcomings, some of the movie’s strengths are also weaknesses. While a sub-90- minute runtime is refreshing, it also leaves the impression that more could have been done with this story. While the movie’s final 10 minutes are largely exhilarating, it concludes rapidly and may have benefited from a little more breathing room. A slightly longer runtime could have given certain plot elements more in-depth explanations, including the infected young girl Bryan encounters and the ex-military character who skillfully dispatches a group of infected monsters. Both are introduced too briefly to leave much of an impression. Bryan’s reckoning with potentially becoming a father is thematically important to the movie, but goes unaddressed after he begins his ascent at the hospital. Bryan’s dialogue, while often hilarious, does get repetitive, something that could have been alleviated by featuring another character or two more heavily.
Regardless, Resident Evil is a whole lot of fun. With his third effective movie in as many tries, Cregger is now undeniably a top voice in horror. But the technical mastery displayed in this tight feature is reason enough to consider the possibility that he might be emerging as one of cinema’s most exciting filmmakers working today. Viewers should expect Cregger to be a regular in cinema going forward, much like other talented directors such as Jordan Peele, who leveraged horror into immense critical and commercial success. Resident Evil is an exciting movie from an exciting new voice and is worth buying a movie ticket to see on the big screen before it goes to streaming.