'Resident Evil' (2026): Zach Cregger Turns a Beloved Franchise Into the Horror-Comedy of the Year
A total newcomer to the games walked in blind and walked out grinning — gory, funny, and anchored by the best performance of Austin Abrams' career.
How does somebody who writes about movies and plays dozens of video games manage to arrive at 2026 without ever playing, or even watching, a single Resident Evil anything? I don't have a satisfying answer, only the blank slate I walked in with - no nostalgia, no fan expectations, nothing but the fact that Zach Cregger was behind the camera, and that after Barbarian and Weapons I'd trust him with almost any premise. That trust paid off: this is a genuinely great time at the cinema, tense and gross and often very funny.
What struck me most is how obviously Cregger built this as a love letter rather than a cash-in: the drawer-opening, the ammo-counting, the locks that laugh at bullets and car doors alike, all of it clearly lifted straight from the games, confirmed by the teenagers behind me reacting to beats I couldn't have recognized on my own (small mercy of watching this abroad, in a language I don't speak - no spoilers reached me through their gasps). I went in assuming the source material was pure dread, but some digging afterward taught me the games carry their own accidental camp, and that context reframes what Cregger's doing here: this isn't horror occasionally undercut by comedy, but intentionally, purposefully a horror-comedy, and the balance between the two registers is remarkably clean. Three separate jump scares actually got me - genuinely got me, which hasn't happened in a long while - while the gore stays constant and unapologetic, nasty in the best way, never once flinching from how aggressive it wants its violence to feel.
Austin Abrams (Weapons) is the best he's ever been on screen: an actor I've always found quietly excellent in supporting parts, finally handed a lead and rising to meet it, playing fear and reluctant competence without tipping into parody or false heroism. Paul Walter Hauser (I, Tonya) is, as ever, funny as hell, milking every drop of incompetence out of his corporate stooge; Zach Cherry (Severance) and Kali Reis (Catch the Fair One) don't get nearly as much to chew on, but neither drags the momentum down. Behind them, Dariusz Wolski's (The Martian) camera and the movie's makeup, prosthetics, and creature VFX are doing career-highlight work - every mutation is genuinely upsetting to look at, and that commitment to practical-feeling nastiness is a huge part of why the scares land as hard as they do.
It has to be said plainly: neither the story nor its subtext comes anywhere close to the layered ideas Cregger was working with in Barbarian or Weapons, and once the machinery kicks in, the plot turns predictable and video-game-y in the most literal sense, hitting the beats you'd expect and arriving at an ending you can see coming from a mile off. None of that stopped me from having a genuinely great time, though, and maybe that's the honest takeaway hiding in here: a story doesn't need to reinvent itself to work, it just needs to know exactly what kind of night it's putting you through and commit to every scream along the way.
Rating: B
