Resident Evil: Zach Cregger’s thrilling reboot pares things back to the essentials of survival horror
The horror auteur has put his own satisfying spin on the Resident Evil movies by largely jettisoning franchise lore for a standalone zombie thriller that captures the maddening experience of playing the games.
Video game adaptations have often struggled to walk the tightrope in forging a distinct identity. Whether too literal or too loose with their source material, many fail to find a fruitful middle ground – even the acclaim bestowed upon an expansive project like HBO’s The Last of Us (2023-2025) couldn’t fully gloss over some of its more rote story beats and problem-solving mechanics.
Zach Cregger’s thrilling reboot of Resident Evil, however, proves a shrewd balancing act. Irreverent but not wildly sacrilegious, it largely jettisons the weight of franchise lore in paring things back to the essentials of ‘survival horror’ (the term coined three decades ago for Capcom’s trailblazing original game). There’s minimal indulgence in fawning fan service; rather droll, concise asides here and there to series iconography via production design and camera setups. For the uninitiated, it works ruthlessly as a standalone, gradually escalating after-hours nightmare. At the same time, it’s a take that wryly deconstructs the visceral – and maddening – experience of playing the games, and the intensifying learning curve that accompanies it.
Those concerned that Cregger’s status as a nascent horror auteur might be compromised by brand shackles need not fret. While absent of the narrative feints and shifting points-of-view from debut feature Barbarian (2022) and more elaborate follow-up Weapons (2025), the relatively linear approach here is key to the film’s barrelling trajectory. It also gleans significant mileage out of making its protagonist haplessly ordinary – and thus an ideal proxy for the novice gamer.
A brash sextet of previous adaptations shepherded by Paul W.S. Anderson made a cultish figure of Milla Jovovich’s genetically augmented, roundhouse-kicking heroine. Austin Abrams’ Bryan, on the other hand, is an average joe medical courier. Tasked with delivering a mysterious package to the stricken metropolis of Raccoon City, his bewilderment is palpable and pratfalls frequent as he encounters the zombified, grotesquely mutated results of a biotech lab breach. Bryan’s ill-fated nightshift also happens to coincide with the shadow of potential fatherhood, a dilemma that pays off in especially queasy fashion.
Cregger – who’s cited as an influence the marriage of potent scares and screwball gore in Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead II (1987) – similarly intermingles slapstick and shocks to bracing effect. Like Bruce Campbell in Raimi’s film, Abrams is onscreen throughout as all hell breaks loose around him, showcasing perfectly pitched resentment at his spiralling misfortune. For the most part, the jostling elements of knockabout farce and clammy terror are juggled with skill, even when the film’s self-awareness can be laid on a little thickly – Bryan’s victory cry of ‘Video games!’, having defenestrated a pursuing undead horde, being a case in point.
► Resident Evil is in UK cinemas 21 February.