There are few experiences more terrifying than opening a door in a Resident Evil video game. There are, of course, exceptions. There is opening a credit-card statement after a particularly ambitious vacation, opening your refrigerator and discovering that something inside has developed its own ecosystem, or opening an email from your accountant that begins, “We need to talk.” But none of these quite compares to the original PlayStation experience of slowly turning a doorknob while a scratchy orchestral score informs you that your next few seconds may involve the consumption of your face.
When Resident Evil arrived on the original PlayStation, it transformed the zombie genre and helped make survival horror a cultural institution. You searched for ammunition, rationed your weapons, solved puzzles, and wandered through corridors that seemed specifically designed by someone who hated you. The game understood that terror was not necessarily about what you saw but what you suspected was waiting around the corner. Every door was a question. Every bullet was a financial decision. And every zombie was a reminder that perhaps you should have pursued a career in accounting.
The franchise has since spawned countless video game sequels, remakes, spin-offs, and enough lore to keep an entire university department employed. It also inspired a seven-film franchise starring Milla Jovovich, which made millions upon millions of dollars while gradually transforming the original games’ claustrophobic terror into a cinematic universe of martial arts, elaborate explosions, and increasingly athletic ways to kill the undead. By the end, I half expected Jovovich to defeat the T-virus by performing a backflip over a burning helicopter while signing autographs.
Now, after years of cinematic decompression, Resident Evil has returned, this time under the direction of Zach Cregger, the filmmaker behind Barbarian and the Oscar-winning Weapons. Cregger, whose comedic roots in The Whitest Kids U’ Know have served him remarkably well in the horror business, understands that comedy and terror are not opposites. They are siblings who grew up sharing a bedroom, learned to hate each other, and occasionally collaborate on elaborate schemes to ruin your evening.
His new Resident Evil is not a sequel, prequel, sidequel, or whatever other contractual arrangement Hollywood has devised to prevent a franchise from dying peacefully. It is a reboot, a fresh start, and, in my estimation, the best film in the series. It may also be the best video-game adaptation ever put on film, a claim I make with the confidence of someone who has watched a great many video-game adaptations and survived the experience with only minor emotional scarring. Cregger has taken a franchise with decades of mythology and distilled it into something wonderfully straightforward. He has taken one ordinary guy, one very bad delivery, and approximately seven million reasons to reconsider accepting overtime.
The film follows Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, a medical courier in Colorado whose life is already having a rough go of it. His relationship with his girlfriend is on the rocks, his job is hardly glamorous, and his career involves transporting mysterious medical packages for people who presumably do not want to meet him socially. At the end of an otherwise ordinary day, he is offered double pay to deliver what he believes is another organ to someone who desperately needs it.
Now, I have never been a medical courier, but I would imagine that when someone offers you double the money to deliver a mysterious organ after dark, there are certain questions you should ask. Is the organ refrigerated? Is the recipient expecting it? Is there a signature required? And, perhaps most importantly, why does this transaction feel like the first ten minutes of a horror movie? Bryan asks none of these questions. Instead, he accepts the job and heads down the icy, snow-covered roads toward Raccoon City.
Anyone familiar with the Resident Evil games knows that Raccoon City is not exactly a destination for a relaxing weekend. It is the sort of place where the tourism board should have been dissolved years ago. If a city has become synonymous with biological catastrophe, monstrous mutations, and the widespread failure of public safety, perhaps the welcome sign should simply read: RACCOON CITY: PLEASE KEEP YOUR HANDS INSIDE THE VEHICLE AT ALL TIMES. Bryan, unfortunately, has not done his research.
Cregger begins the film with a farmhouse, a pickup truck, and an isolated stretch of countryside that immediately suggests Bryan should have stayed home and worked on his relationship. The horror arrives gradually, creeping into the story before the film expands into the city itself. It is a deliberate progression from the familiar to the unthinkable, from a bad night at work to the sort of evening that makes you appreciate every boring day you have ever complained about. And Bryan is spectacularly unprepared.
He does not know how to handle a gun. He cannot fight. He struggles with fences and locks. He is not a highly trained government operative with a military background and a suspiciously well-maintained collection of tactical equipment. He is a regular guy who probably has a preferred gas station and a favorite breakfast sandwich. In other words, Bryan is the kind of person I would want beside me during a zombie apocalypse, provided that I had already secured a much more competent person to stand on the other side of him.
But Bryan has guts. He has grit. And he has the ability to think on his feet, even when those feet are desperately trying to carry him away from something with too many teeth. His greatest weapon is not a firearm but his stubborn refusal to accept that the evening has become unsalvageable. Abrams is terrific in the role, giving Bryan the frantic, bewildered energy of an ordinary man who has suddenly discovered that the world is considerably more dangerous than his employee handbook suggested. Watching him improvise his way through the carnage is one of the film’s great pleasures. He is a little like Bruce Campbell’s Ash in the Evil Dead movies, except that Ash eventually acquired a chainsaw for a hand, whereas Bryan seems like the kind of guy who would struggle to assemble an IKEA bookshelf without consulting a YouTube tutorial.
His transformation into a reluctant monster killer is both suspenseful and hilarious. He does not suddenly become an unstoppable action hero. He simply becomes a man who has realized that the alternative to learning how to kill monsters is becoming lunch. And that, as far as survival strategies go, is a pretty persuasive argument. What Cregger understands, better than many filmmakers who have attempted to adapt video games, is that the experience of playing Resident Evil is not primarily about watching explosions or admiring elaborate computer-generated monsters. It is about vulnerability. It is about being trapped in an environment you do not understand, with limited resources and a growing suspicion that the last decision you made was a mistake.
The previous films often seemed determined to make everything bigger. Bigger action sequences. Bigger conspiracies. Bigger explosions. Bigger stakes. The mythology expanded until it occasionally felt as though the movies were being held hostage by their own continuity. Characters came and went, returned from the dead, and appeared to have been resurrected by a studio executive who had misplaced the original script. Cregger has no interest in that sort of cinematic bookkeeping. He keeps the story focused and the stakes immediate. Bryan has a package to deliver, and the world is trying to kill him before he can deliver it. The premise is so simple that it feels almost revolutionary.
There is no enormous Michael Bay-style action sequence designed to drown the audience in noise and debris. Instead, Cregger builds tension through geography, timing, and the unnerving possibility that something terrible might happen in the next few seconds. A hallway becomes a threat. A farmhouse becomes a trap. A quiet road becomes an obstacle course. Even the most ordinary object seems capable of becoming an instrument of death. It is the same elegant cruelty that made the original games so effective. You are not frightened because the movie is constantly showing you monsters. You are frightened because it keeps reminding you that monsters might be nearby, and you have absolutely no idea what to do when they arrive. Of course, they do arrive. And they arrive in spectacularly disgusting fashion.
The creatures in this Resident Evil are grotesque, inventive, and frequently so outrageous that I found myself wondering whether Cregger had been granted access to John Carpenter’s personal nightmare journal. There are monstrous animals, horrifying mutations, and creatures that appear to have been assembled by a deranged surgeon who has been given unlimited funding and no adult supervision. The influence of Carpenter’s The Thing is particularly evident in the film’s most grotesque creations. Bodies become unreliable. Flesh behaves in ways flesh should not behave. Familiar shapes mutate into something deeply wrong. It is the kind of creature design that makes you appreciate the human body’s usual commitment to keeping its organs where they belong.
And the gore. Oh, the gore. There is enough blood and bodily mayhem here to make a slaughterhouse look like a meditation retreat. Cregger understands that practical effects, when used with imagination and a little cruelty, can produce a visceral reaction that no amount of digital spectacle can quite replicate. The violence is startling, messy, and often absurdly funny. At times, the movie seems to be daring the audience to maintain a straight face while something deeply unpleasant happens to somebody’s anatomy. I did not always succeed.
The film has the spirit of an especially deranged 1980s horror picture, when filmmakers seemed to believe that the best way to entertain an audience was to make it scream, laugh, and then question whether it should have laughed. Cregger has brought that sensibility into a modern blockbuster without sanding away its rough edges. His monsters are not merely obstacles to be defeated, but rather, they are walking, crawling, squelching reminders that nature has a sense of humor and that it is not especially kind.
The humor is equally effective because it emerges from Bryan’s predicament rather than from the movie constantly winking at the audience. He is funny because he is terrified. He is funny because he is incompetent. He is funny because he is attempting to navigate a world that has suddenly become a terrible combination of The Walking Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and a particularly aggressive customer-service complaint. Cregger knows that laughter can make horror more frightening, not less. A moment of absurdity allows you to relax just enough for the next scare to land. It is a technique he has used to devastating effect in Barbarian and Weapons, and here he applies it to a franchise that has always possessed a certain inherent ridiculousness beneath its gothic exterior.
The video-game references are also handled with a welcome lightness. They are not shoved into the story like nostalgic Easter eggs delivered by a particularly enthusiastic intern. They emerge naturally, rewarding longtime fans while remaining accessible to anyone who has never touched a PlayStation controller. Cregger understands that the best adaptation is not necessarily the one that reproduces every detail of the source material. It is the one that recreates the feeling of experiencing it. And this film feels like Resident Evil. It feels like wandering through a dangerous environment with too little ammunition. It feels like making a desperate decision because standing still is no longer an option. It feels like opening a door and immediately regretting having hands.
It also arrives at a moment when horror has become one of the most vital forces in contemporary cinema. The genre is attracting major filmmakers, earning critical recognition, and drawing audiences who are increasingly willing to spend their money on movies that are strange, disturbing, and occasionally difficult to explain to their parents. Horror has proved that it can compete with the biggest names in Hollywood without requiring a superhero, a multiverse, or a dinosaur that has somehow learned to operate heavy machinery.
Cregger’s Resident Evil is a particularly satisfying example of what the genre can do when a filmmaker trusts its instincts. It is intelligent without being self-important, funny without becoming a parody, and entertaining without feeling disposable. It takes a familiar property and discovers something fresh inside it. By the time the film reaches its blood-soaked conclusion, I found myself feeling something I had not expected after so many years of Resident Evil movies, which was that I wanted to return to this world. Not because I have any desire to be chased through a laboratory by a genetically engineered monster. Not because I would enjoy discovering that my neighborhood pharmacy has secretly been conducting biological experiments. And certainly not because I believe I would survive in Raccoon City for more than the time it takes to find a parking space.
I want to return because Cregger has reminded me how much fun this franchise can be when it stops trying to explain itself and simply lets the nightmare unfold. This is a Resident Evil movie that understands the terror of opening a door, the absurdity of fighting monsters, and the strange pleasure of watching an ordinary person become a very unlikely hero. It is bloody, clever, frightening, and frequently hilarious. It respects the games without becoming imprisoned by their mythology, and it gives the franchise something it has desperately needed: a sense of discovery.
I hope this is the beginning of a new chapter, one that continues in the same spirit of simplicity, practical grotesquerie, and gloriously bad decisions. Give me more Bryan. Give me more monsters. Give me more doors that should absolutely remain closed. And, for heaven’s sake, somebody give that man a raise. After all, double pay is hardly adequate compensation for delivering an organ to Raccoon City.
