RESIDENT EVIL (2026)

Genre: Horror/Thriller
Director: Zach Cregger
Cast: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser
Runtime: 1 hr 34 mins
Rating: M18 (Gore & Coarse Language)
Released By: Sony Pictures
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 17 September 2026

Synopsis: From the mind of visionary filmmaker Zach Cregger (Weapons, Barbarian) comes a thrilling —and terrifying — reinvention of the Resident Evil franchise. In an all-new story, Resident Evil follows Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who unwittingly finds himself in an action-packed, non-stop race for survival as one fateful, horrifying night collapses around him in chaos.

Movie Review:

You have to wonder what Zach Cregger was thinking.

After Barbarian and Weapons, two wildly original horror movies that established him as one of the genre’s most exciting filmmakers, Cregger could presumably have made just about anything he wanted. So why choose Resident Evil – a video-game franchise that has already produced seven movies over more than two decades, with decidedly mixed results? 

Watch his Resident Evil, though, and you quickly understand the attraction. Rather than having his creativity swallowed up by a lumbering franchise, Cregger appears to have treated the assignment as an excuse to cut loose.

The result is a lean, fast and very funny horror movie that feels unmistakably like his own.

Cregger wisely leaves most of the complicated Resident Evil mythology behind. There is Raccoon City, there is the Umbrella Corporation and there is, naturally, a viral outbreak turning people into horrible creatures. But you do not need to know anything about the games or previous movies to follow what is happening.

Instead, the story could hardly be simpler. Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier who accepts a last-minute job transporting an important package to Raccoon City General Hospital. Unfortunately, he has chosen possibly the worst night in history to make the trip. 

It is a terrific setup because Cregger basically spends the next 90 minutes asking: how much worse can one delivery possibly get?

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Bryan first hits a woman wandering along a snowy road. Being a decent guy, he puts the badly injured stranger in his car and tries to get her to hospital. There are already warning signs that something is seriously wrong with her, but Bryan is slow to notice them. A policeman arrives, seemingly offering salvation. Needless to say, things only get worse from there. 

That opening stretch establishes the movie’s rhythm. Bryan escapes one disaster, stumbles into another and somehow keeps going. He winds up at an apparently deserted farmhouse. There is an angry dog. Then the dog’s face splits open and sprouts tentacles. There are infected people, a camper van, sewers and increasingly grotesque monsters. Eventually Bryan reaches Raccoon City itself, only to discover that getting there was the easy part. 

It is gruesome stuff, but what makes Resident Evil such a pleasant surprise is how funny it is.

Cregger has always had a mischievous streak, but Resident Evil reveals a wonderfully dry sense of humour that neither Barbarian nor Weapons displayed quite so freely. The jokes do not feel pasted onto the horror. Most come from watching Bryan react like an ordinary person would if confronted by increasingly ridiculous horrors.

And that is where Austin Abrams becomes the movie’s secret weapon.

Abrams, who previously appeared in Weapons, is on screen for almost the entire film. Bryan is no action hero. He is frightened, confused, not especially good with a gun and frequently seems as baffled by what is happening as we are. At one point the film turns his inability to shoot open a padlock into a running joke. His evening gradually takes him from bewilderment to panic to sheer irritation at having yet another monster appear in front of him. 

Abrams plays all of this beautifully. He never tries too hard to be funny. Bryan simply wants to deliver his package and survive the night, and his growing disbelief at everything standing in his way becomes hilarious.

That also gives Cregger someone we genuinely want to follow. Rather than filling the movie with heavily armed heroes who know exactly how to kill zombies, he puts us alongside a guy who can barely figure out how to load his weapon when something is charging at him. 

Cregger then builds the film around a succession of wonderfully staged sequences.

One has Bryan trying to survive the farmhouse and its monstrous inhabitants. Another turns his journey through the city into an obstacle course as infected bodies come crashing down around him. The hospital delivers perhaps the film’s craziest stretch, including a maternity ward that Cregger turns into the stuff of nightmares. 

There is a videogame quality to the way Bryan moves from one location to another, solving immediate problems simply to keep going. Open this door. Get past that monster. Find another route. Reach the next floor. Cregger occasionally even switches into a first-person view, putting us directly behind Bryan’s gun. Yet the movie never feels like someone else playing a videogame while we watch. 

Most importantly, Cregger keeps things moving.

At around 90 minutes, Resident Evil has almost no fat. There is barely time to recover from one set piece before the next begins, and the monsters keep changing enough that the film never settles into the usual routine of shooting interchangeable zombies. Cregger borrows gleefully from films such as The Thing and Alien, but throws those influences together with enough energy and invention to make the resulting monster mash his own. 

There are limitations though. The supporting characters barely have time to register, while Bryan’s worries about becoming a father never develop into anything especially substantial. Resident Evil does not have the emotional depth of Weapons, nor the audacious narrative surprises of Barbarian. Indeed, the movie works best when it is racing forward and loses some energy whenever it slows down. 

But perhaps that is beside the point. Cregger has not made another Weapons. He has made an exceptionally well-crafted B-movie – bloody, tense, ridiculous and frequently hilarious – and seems to have had tremendous fun doing it.

That may ultimately explain why Resident Evil was worth his time. Cregger has taken a franchise that appeared to have very little life left in it and found something playful and personal inside. Instead of being dragged down by the demands of established IP, he has used them as a giant sandbox for his own wicked imagination.

Here is hoping that this opens a fresh chapter for Resident Evil – just not so fresh that Cregger ends up spending the next decade making sequels; because as much fun as it is watching him breathe new life into somebody else’s world, Barbarian and Weapons showed us how exciting he can be when he is building strange new worlds entirely of his own.

Movie Rating:

(Zach Cregger breathes wickedly funny new life into Resident Evil, devliering a lean, inventive and relentlessly entertaining horror ride anchored by a terrific Austin Abrams)

Review by Gabriel Chong