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(Review) RESIDENT EVIL Get the Video Game Movie Right! With Monsters, Mayhem, and One Very Unlucky Everyman

By Professor Horror

Video game movies have a long and proud history of being...well, pretty terrible. Yes, I say this as someone who genuinely likes 1993’s Super Mario Bros., so perhaps my judgment should already be considered sus. The problem has rarely been that games cannot translate to film so much as filmmakers struggling to figure out what exactly should make the trip. Is it the characters? The story? The lore? Or is it the particular experience of wandering into a room, finding six bullets and a suspiciously locked door? With RESIDENT EVIL, Zach Cregger wisely chooses that last option. Rather than attempting to reproduce one of the games beat for beat, he brings the strange combination of horror, absurdity, and escalating chaos that defined Barbarian and Weapons into Raccoon City, creating something that feels remarkably like playing a Resident Evil game even when it isn't recreating one.

The film begins with an organ courier arriving at a hospital with his precious cargo in tow, only to struggle to find anyone willing to take the damn thing from him. Cregger follows Bryan (Austin Abrams) through the busy hospital in a long tracking shot, passing bleeding patients and overworked doctors while he desperately tries to complete what should be a very simple delivery. Bryan is already over his job and just wants to get home to his partner, Michelle, so they can finish an uncomfortable conversation in person. Then someone offers him double pay to transport a package to Raccoon City General. Whether it is the money or the opportunity to postpone that conversation with Michelle, Bryan accepts and drives off into the snowy hellscape. The roads provide little visibility and even less cell reception, but things get considerably worse when a woman wearing nothing but a sundress wanders directly into the path of his car. So, Bryan now has two pieces of fragile cargo: one safely packed in a medical container and the other bloody and dazed and sitting in the passenger seat next to him. 

This is where Cregger's particular combination of horror and comedy becomes essential to RESIDENT EVIL. Barbarian and Weapons both understand that terror and absurdity are not opposites, and Cregger again allows one to make the other stranger. Bryan is the perfect protagonist for that approach because he is aggressively ordinary. Abrams plays him as the kind of guy for whom daily life already seems to require a little more concentration than it does for everyone else, which makes dropping him into an undead apocalypse particularly cruel. He has no specialized training, no action-hero physique, and absolutely none of the confidence of someone who has spent years preparing to roundhouse kick zombies in the face. Instead, he survives through some combination of dumb luck, panic, stubbornness, and the occasional useful idea. By the time he inevitably reaches an abandoned farmhouse decorated with taxidermy, RESIDENT EVIL has made its intentions clear: Bryan may not know he's in a horror game, but everyone watching certainly does.

Bryan isn't the only ordinary person having a very bad day with creatures he was wildly unprepared to meet. In THE END OF OAK STREET, an entire suburban neighborhood gets dropped into the prehistoric past, proving once again that survival gets considerably harder when the monsters show up without an instruction manual.

Bryan bumbles through this environment like Harry and Marv wandering into a city-sized Kevin McCallister trap, swearing a blue streak while every new room finds another way to hurt him. Structurally, RESIDENT EVIL is essentially a point-A-to-point-B quest narrative: Bryan has a package, Raccoon City General is the destination, and nearly everything that happens exists to make reaching it more difficult. What makes that simplicity work is that Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten organize those obstacles according to video game logic rather than conventional movie plotting. Bryan moves from location to location, scavenging weapons and ammunition, encountering a new creature or environmental obstacle, surviving it, and carrying whatever he learned or collected into the next area. A farmhouse gives way to city streets, which gives way to another encounter, until the world starts to feel less like a conventional cinematic geography than a series of levels. Cregger even occasionally shifts into a first-person shooter perspective, but uses it sparingly enough that it feels like a nod to the source medium rather than a visual gimmick. There are puzzles, limited resources, locked gates and, because every Resident Evil fan knows this, the eternal indignity of discovering that apparently you cannot just shoot the fucking lock. Some viewers will undoubtedly find the plot thin, but that's also why the adaptation works: Cregger isn't merely adapting the mythology of Resident Evil. He's adapting the experience of playing it.

And good lord, does RESIDENT EVIL give us plenty to scan for. The creature effects embrace the franchise's long tradition of treating the human body as something that can be stretched, split, fused, and rearranged until anatomy becomes more of a suggestion than a rule. More importantly, Cregger doesn't simply fill Raccoon City with interchangeable zombies. The infected seem to become stranger and more elaborate as Bryan moves forward, giving each new location its own biological problem to solve. That escalation fits perfectly with the film's video game structure. Just as Bryan acquires new weapons and becomes better at surviving, the things trying to kill him become increasingly difficult to understand, much less fight. Most memorable is the monstrosity that continually pursues Bryan (something I can only describe as a tumbleweed made out of legs and torsos) rolling human anatomy into a shape that is simultaneously disgusting and ridiculous. The gore follows the same philosophy. Bodies rupture, mutate, and come apart with enough enthusiasm that the violence becomes part of the film's comedy.

For all its deliberately game-like simplicity, however, RESIDENT EVIL gives Bryan one problem that cannot be solved by finding ammunition in a drawer. Before his trip to Raccoon City, he and Michelle are already dealing with an unexpected pregnancy and the question of whether they actually want to become parents. Cregger carries that uncertainty into the horror, repeatedly twisting images of children, pregnancy, and reproduction into something grotesque. Along the way, Bryan encounters an infected child and eventually finds himself in a maternity ward, allowing the film to play with his anxieties without stopping to explain them. I don't think RESIDENT EVIL is necessarily making a larger argument about abortion, but it does seem interested in Bryan's uncertainty about children and the future he and Michelle might have together. Raccoon City simply takes those very ordinary anxieties and makes them considerably more fucked up.

That thread also helps explain why Bryan works better than a more traditionally capable protagonist would have. His journey is not really about discovering that he was secretly an action hero all along. He becomes more competent because he has no choice, but he never stops feeling like the same slightly overwhelmed guy who just wanted to finish his shift and go home. That makes the game's familiar progression from vulnerability to capability feel unusually human. At the beginning, Bryan barely seems equipped for the conversation waiting for him at home, much less Raccoon City. By the end, he has collected weapons, solved problems, killed monsters, and absorbed enough punishment to qualify as a Resident Evil protagonist, but none of that magically answers the question he was avoiding before the nightmare began. Cregger lets those two forms of adulthood sit beside one another: the absurd fantasy of learning how to survive monsters and the much less cinematic terror of figuring out what you actually want from your life.

That's ultimately why RESIDENT EVIL works as a video game adaptation without tying itself to the plot of a particular game. Cregger understands that fidelity does not have to mean dragging familiar characters and cutscenes onto the screen and congratulating audiences for recognizing them. Sometimes fidelity is structural. It's entering a new area and immediately wondering what is going to attack you, counting your ammunition, finding a weapon at exactly the moment you need it, solving a stupidly elaborate obstacle, and discovering that whatever is behind the next door is somehow worse than what was behind the last one. RESIDENT EVIL takes that rhythm and builds horror (and even some comedy) around an everyman who seems increasingly irritated that the universe will not simply let him deliver his stupid package. It has Cregger's sense of absurdity, some wonderfully disgusting creature work, and just enough visual nods to gaming to acknowledge where it came from without turning the entire movie into fan service. So after decades of Hollywood trying to figure out how to make video games into movies, I just want to say: Yeah! Video games!

If RESIDENT EVIL leaves you wondering what else filmmakers can possibly do with infected bodies, Radek Velicka asked that exact question in his review of COLONY, where the zombies learn, communicate, adapt, and move as one.

RESIDENT EVIL hits theatres 17 September 2026.