RESIDENT EVIL (2026) Directed by Zach Cregger
Critical Screening Score: 8.7/10
SPOILERS THROUGHOUT
I went into Resident Evil with a problem. I already wanted it to be good.
I am a fan of Zach Cregger, and being this involved in horror culture and filmmaking makes it almost impossible to arrive at a movie completely clean. By release week, there had already been screener chatter, early reactions, clips and the usual online noise telling everybody what to think before they had bought a ticket. I avoided as much of it as I could. I wanted to give the movie a fair shot, including a fair shot at disappointing me.
I saw it twice in three days. Thursday night in IMAX at AMC Springfield 12, I mostly watched it for enjoyment and kept a few mental notes. Saturday at the Illinois Theatre, I made the critic part of my brain clock in. The second viewing did not expose a movie running on surprise alone. It showed me how carefully the thing is put together.
The story is almost insultingly simple, and I mean that as a compliment. Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, is a medical courier who accepts an extra delivery to Raccoon City. He thinks he is carrying an organ. What he actually has is material Umbrella needs to create a cure while a viral outbreak chews through the city. He has to get the package to the hospital. That is the job. Everything between Bryan and that hospital would like to bite, tear apart, infect or embarrass him.
Cregger and co-writer Shay Hatten give the movie the forward pull of a video game without turning it into somebody else's playthrough. Every new location has its own geography and its own terrible little problem. A farmhouse. A blocked road. An RV. The city streets. A parking garage. A maternity ward. The laboratory waiting at the top. Bryan moves through these spaces like a player who missed the tutorial and is now learning the controls while something runs at him.
Abrams is outstanding from the beginning. Bryan is not an action hero and does not suddenly become one because the movie needs him to look cool. He is nervous, physically overmatched and terrible with a gun. There is a difference between a frightened person making mistakes and a screenwriter forcing a character to act like an idiot. Abrams stays on the right side of that line. He makes Bryan incompetent enough to be funny and capable enough that I still believed he might survive.
The early farmhouse sequence establishes all of this fast. Bryan is trying to understand a weapon while a murderous infected woman is trying to reach him. Cregger finds the comedy without making the danger harmless. The joke is not that she is ridiculous. The joke is that death is moving much faster than Bryan's competence. That is a difficult tone to hold, and Cregger holds it.
He also knows exactly when to cut. A fraction of a second earlier and a scare becomes obvious. A fraction later and a joke lies dead on the floor. Editor Joe Murphy keeps finding that narrow opening where panic can turn funny and then snap right back into panic. The first major jump after the woman on the road got me both times, even when I knew it was coming. That is not an accident.
Dariusz Wolski's cinematography gives the movie more visual care than a ninety-some-minute run from point A to point B strictly requires. The farmhouse and road scenes are especially strong. Bryan is often small in the frame, with empty land or dark architecture around him and just enough space left open for my eyes to start searching. The compositions do not merely photograph the action. They make me look for danger before Bryan knows where it is.
The film understands geography, which should be a basic requirement for an action sequence but apparently is not. I usually know where Bryan came from, where he needs to go and what is now blocking him. That clarity lets the movie become frantic without becoming mush. Cregger can throw bodies, blood and noise across the frame because Wolski has already shown us the room.
The sound does just as much work. The score by Hays and Ryan Holladay pushes when it needs to push and backs away when silence will make the next sound hurt more. The impact of the jumps comes from the setup, not only from turning the speakers into weapons. Engines, gunshots, distant movement and sudden quiet all become part of the threat. In IMAX, some of it felt less like hearing a movie and more like the building had developed a medical problem.
The girl in the RV is one of the movie's best smaller turns. What first looks like a possible rescue becomes sad, frightening and then violent with almost no warning. Cregger does not milk the child for easy sympathy or use her as a standard creepy-kid gimmick. For a moment, Bryan sees somebody he might still be able to save. Then her face opens, she bites him, and he has to shoot her. That is the movie in miniature. Hope appears, mutates and tries to eat you.
Once Bryan reaches Raccoon City, the movie goes feral.
The run through the street is probably the most mind-blowing sequence in the film. Infected bodies throw themselves from rooftops and explode around Bryan while he keeps moving because stopping would be worse. It feels immediate, filthy and dangerous. Afterward, I learned that the production used body-sized blood bags dropped from cranes for much of that chaos. No wonder it has weight. Bryan is not jogging through clean digital geometry. Real things are hitting the ground around Abrams, and the camera catches the panic instead of manufacturing all of it later.
Paul Walter Hauser and Kali Reis are genuinely funny when Bryan runs into them. Their appearance briefly gives him other people to react to, but it does not turn the film into a buddy movie or stop the forward motion. The humor comes from watching people cling to corporate procedure and military certainty while Raccoon City is turning into soup around them. Everybody knows a little something. Nobody knows enough.
The movie barely slows down, so the parking-garage scene matters. Bryan finally has enough time to think about his girlfriend, Michelle, and the baby they are expecting. He records what he believes may be his last message and allows himself to understand that he probably is not getting home. Abrams plays it without begging for an award. He is just a scared man who suddenly has nowhere to put the fear.
Then the intercom interrupts him.
The voice, performed by Cregger himself, cuts into the sadness at exactly the right moment. It is hilarious, but it does not erase what Abrams just did. The laugh comes because the movie refuses to let Bryan control even his own goodbye. He cannot finish a private breakdown without the nightmare handing him another set of directions.
The trip through the hospital is wild, especially the maternity ward. Putting a man who is terrified he will never meet his child inside a corrupted place of birth is not subtle. It does not need to be. The setting makes his private fear physical. He is trying to reach the possibility of a future while every room shows him life turned into meat, infection or another locked door.
Upstairs, the scientists are protected, naive and pathetic in a very funny way. They have spent the night above the carnage, believing procedure will eventually deliver the answer to them. In a sense, it does. Bryan gets the material to the lab. They synthesize the cure. The mission is completed.
Bryan is not saved.
His infection takes over before the scientists can treat him. His body erupts, the lab becomes another slaughterhouse and the cure falls from the sky bridge. The final image leaves Bryan transformed into one more monster, roaring at the approaching helicopter. After everything he endures, the movie denies him the reunion, the baby and even the dignity of dying as himself.
That ending will probably be the most controversial part of the movie. It is not the ending I wanted for Bryan, which is part of why I respect it. Cregger does not treat a survival story as a contract promising survival. Bryan finishes the objective and still loses. The film has been telling us all night that effort, decency and dumb luck are not the same as immunity. Giving him a clean escape would have been more satisfying in the moment and less honest to the mean little machine Cregger built.
Subverting an expectation is not automatically clever. Sometimes it is just a filmmaker yanking the wheel because the audience saw the road sign. This ending works because it completes the movie's logic. Every temporary victory has carried the next disaster inside it. The delivery that might save the city is also what takes Bryan deeper into it. The child he tries to rescue infects him. The laboratory he fights to reach becomes the place where he finally destroys what he carried there. Cruel, yes. Random, no.
I loved the movie, but there are a couple things I could have used less of. Some of the digital effects have that slightly frictionless quality CGI can carry, especially beside the practical creature and gore work. Shane Mahan and the Legacy Effects team give the infected real weight and texture, which makes the more obviously digital movement easier to notice. Still, the visual effects are done well enough that they never pulled me out of the movie. With this scale of destruction and transformation, some digital work is unavoidable. The important thing is that I kept believing Bryan was in danger.
Bryan also talks to himself a little too much. Some of it is funny and some of it keeps us connected to a character who spends much of the movie alone. A few lines repeat the same anxious note after Abrams has already communicated it with his face and body. I understand the practical problem. There are not many dialogue options when your co-stars keep trying to eat you. Understanding the reason does not make every line necessary.
Those are nitpicks, but they are real ones. A strong movie does not need me to pretend every decision is perfect.
I do not consider Resident Evil a horror comedy. It is a horror movie that understands people sometimes laugh when the alternative is screaming, and it knows that one can make the other hit harder. The comedy is not sitting beside the fear. It is inside the timing of it. Cregger lets the pressure out for half a second, gets the laugh, then closes the valve on our fingers.
Plenty of movies can be violent. Plenty can be funny. Plenty can hit the audience with a loud sound and call it a scare. Very few can move among all three this quickly without becoming smug, weightless or confused about what they are. Cregger, Abrams, Wolski, Murphy and the Holladays stay in sync almost the entire way.
After two viewings, Resident Evil is probably the best horror movie I have seen this year. It is brutal, beautifully made, genuinely scary and much funnier than it has any right to be. It also has the nerve to let its hero complete the mission and lose anyway.
8.7/10