Hollywood’s reward for Zach Cregger’s hearteningly original, non-franchise horror hits Barbarian (2022) and the Oscar-winning Weapons (2025) is the chance to reboot the Resident Evil franchise. The director tackles the video game genre with his usual verve, but it still feels like a considerable comedown.
Cregger has scraped away the encrusted mythology of Paul Anderson’s gloomy Milla Jovovich vehicles, favouring a cinematic equivalent to playing the horror survival game. Bryan (Austin Abrahams, who played Weapons’ flaky drug addict hero) is a nervy, fast-talking medical courier tempted by double-pay to ferry an extra package through a blizzard to Racoon City’s General Hospital. His girlfriend is on the phone telling her she’s pregnant when he hits a woman lurching out of the dark. Former comedian Cregger’s crazed, character-based horror mode is tautly effective in these early scenes as headlights stain the snow red, and only windscreen wipers and the crunch of boots punctuate the stillness as Bryan tracks the woman into the fairy tale woods and sits her in his car. His efforts at dutiful normality despite her incipient blood-crazed zombiedom provides much of the jittery humour.
Bryan soon has to escape into the snowbound country dark and a lonely old farmhouse whose landline allows a last, one-way message home to his girlfriend. Premonitory suspense and hysterical splatter outbursts mix here, promising real scares but delivering comic mayhem. Sam Raimi’s gore action zombie comedy Evil Dead II (1987) was a key inspiration for the resultant surreal slapstick. Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski’s lush organic hues add to a sense of tangible reality, even as tendril-spurting horrors evoke make-up effects master Rob Bottin’s Lovecraftian sculpted viscera in The Thing (1982).
Inept everyman Bryan is picked up by passing employees of the Umbrella Corporation, whose bioweapon experiments have led “super-evolved” monsters to rapidly overwhelm Racoon City. Now the action is funnelled through cramped city streets, emphasising Bryan’s player role and video game cinema’s innate drawbacks. The ensuing survival horror shoot-‘em-up is enlivened by the monsters’ baroque variety, from a rooftop rain of blood-bag lemmings to a pregnant rat-king straight out of James Herbert. Following the early scenes’ eerie wrong-footing, though, the chases are as tediously repetitive as the video game-manque John Wick films where co-writer Shay Hatten made his name.
Cregger’s inspiration revives when Bryan is tasked with ascending the infected high-rise hospital in a zombie replay of tower-block action classic The Raid (2011), and the director rallies impressively for a typically twisty, gonzo climax.
A mix of Cregger’s own game fandom and commerce seems to have caused this detour into IP revival, and he explores the possibilities of game-inspired narrative more thoughtfully than most. The Kinks’ “Animal Farm” kicks in over the end-credits, mirroring Weapons’ hip opening with George Harrison’s “I See A Darkness”. Resident Evil can’t, though, can’t come close to Cregger’s previously unfettered instincts.
