Adam Matthews returns to Raccoon City to catch the latest Resident Evil.
There is something refreshingly simple about Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil. Austin Abrams plays Bryan, an unfortunate medical courier whose evening gradually mutates into a wintry nightmare of locked doors, grotesque creatures, and increasingly terrible decisions. For roughly ninety minutes, Cregger sends him stumbling from one disaster to the next with barely enough time to catch his breath.
At its best, the film resembles a collision between Na Hong-jin’s The Yellow Sea and Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, filtered through the splattery comic chaos of Evil Dead II. It is lean, nasty, and frequently very funny, although the balancing act between these three is somewhat uneven.
Holding everything together is Abrams, who gives the film considerably more emotional weight than its script sometimes deserves. Bryan is not some implausible action hero; he is nervous, exhausted, and visibly overwhelmed by what is happening around him. Abrams finds comedy in that vulnerability, and his timing is particularly strong in the film’s smaller recurring gags, including a very funny fixation on locks.
Paul Walter Hauser also works well as a foil, bouncing naturally off Abrams and pushing some of the film’s comedy towards a more character-driven rhythm. The rest of the supporting cast leave less of an impression, with few of them yielding enough screen time to matter.
Cregger is on firmer ground when dealing with the physical world of the story. The winter setting gives the film an appropriately hostile quality, with the cold seeming to seep into every exterior shot, while some excellent cinematography makes Raccoon City feel both huge and claustrophobic. The use of point-of-view shots is particularly effective, occasionally giving the film the same uneasy first-person feeling as Resident Evil 7 and Resident Evil Village, where simply looking around a room can feel like an invitation for something horrible to step into frame.
The creature design is strong. Rather than leaning heavily on the shambling zombies most closely associated with the earliest Resident Evil games, Cregger’s monsters feel closer to the increasingly bizarre biological horrors of Resident Evil 4, 5, and 6. They are strange and uncanny in their look and movements, giving the film its own visual identity even when it is only loosely tied to the iconography audiences might expect from the franchise.
The references to the games are generally handled with restraint, too. There are recognisable nods scattered throughout for fans, but the film never becomes trapped beneath layers of lore or stops dead to congratulate the audience for recognising something. You do not need to know the difference between Umbrella and a regular umbrella to understand what is happening. At the same time, this raises the film’s most obvious problem as an adaptation: strip the Resident Eviltitle away and surprisingly little about the film would have to change.
This is where Genki Kawamura’s Exit 8 becomes the most useful comparison. The original game is minimal almost to the point of abstraction, built around repetition, observation, and the creeping anxiety of being unable to escape a looping underground corridor. Rather than treating those mechanics as something that needs to be padded out or replaced, Kawamura uses them as the foundation of the film. More importantly, the themes grow directly out of that structure, so the adaptation feels connected to the game without needing to obsess over literal fidelity.
That is the area where Resident Evil feels much less assured. Cregger captures plenty of survival-horror rhythms associated with the series, but fewer things that feel uniquely Resident Evil, and the themes introduced through Bryan never become as closely tied to the film’s structure or world. Exit 8 works better because its ideas about repetition, entrapment, and observation feel inseparable from the experience it is adapting. By comparison, Resident Evil often feels as though its themes and its franchise identity are running alongside the story rather than through it.
There are other examples that prove fidelity itself is not the issue. Mark Fischbach’s Iron Lung is considerably messier and has its own pacing problems, but there is still something bold about how it tries to translate the claustrophobia, limited information, and procedural nature of David Szymanski’s game into a feature film. Oldboy goes much further from its source and succeeds through reinvention. Both are useful comparisons, but Exit 8 is the stronger one here because it shows how an adaptation can change plenty while still making its themes, form, and source material feel like parts of the same thing.
The film’s bigger problem, though, is tonal. Cregger has openly cited Evil Dead II as an influence, and that influence is clear in the mix of bodily horror, slapstick, and escalating misfortune. The difficulty is that, where Sam Raimi fully commits to hysteria, Resident Evil feels like it hesitates a bit. It seems to want emotional sincerity and absurd comedy at the same time, yet too often the comedy arrives exactly when the drama needs room to breathe.
Horror and comedy can obviously coexist, and Evil Dead II remains one of the clearest examples of how well the two can feed into each other. The difference is how completely Raimi commits to that collision of tones. His madness becomes the entire language of the film, whereas Cregger’s jokes sometimes feel less like part of the horror and more like an interruption. Abrams is good enough to move between both modes, but the screenplay keeps making that job harder than it needs to be.
The film’s themes suffer from the same indecision. They give Bryan a believable motivation and occasionally suggest something more substantial beneath the carnage, but Cregger rarely gives those ideas much room to develop before another gag or creature attack takes over. There is nothing wrong with prioritising yucks when the jokes are landing, and plenty of them do, or when the movie is going all-in on laughs, but the film repeatedly hints at emotional depth without quite following through on it. That becomes especially noticeable next to Exit 8, where the similar themes are not simply added to the adaptation but built into the way the story itself functions.
That frustration becomes most noticeable during the third act, easily the film’s weakest stretch. The previously tight structure begins to loosen, while characters suddenly fall into one of horror cinema’s most irritating habits: forced incompetence. Bad decisions can be funny when they grow naturally out of panic, personality, or desperation, but here several exist mainly because the story needs another complication. What had previously felt like controlled escalation starts to feel manufactured, and the line between laughing at Bryan’s misfortune and becoming annoyed by the screenplay gets thinner.
The contemporary setting also feels like a slightly missed opportunity. The snow-covered streets and isolated interiors already give the film a strangely timeless atmosphere, but the constant presence of smartphones keeps pulling it firmly back into the 2020s. Setting the story closer to the era of Resident Evil 2 could have strengthened that atmosphere without requiring any extra fan service. Removing modern technology would naturally make isolation easier to believe, while an older setting could have made this version of Raccoon City feel even more cut off from the outside world.
Taking into account how the lean runtime moves us on from any issues quickly, it looks good, Abrams is terrific, the monsters are memorable, and there are gags that land. It’s enjoyable, but perhaps more so as long as you’re not expecting a particularly faithful adaptation. Cregger has instead made an entertaining survival-horror comedy wearing the franchise’s skin – there is still plenty of fun to be had in the strange, messy mutation it becomes.
In cinemas from 18th September 2026
