Resident Evil (2026) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Resident Evil

⭐⭐⭐⭐1/2

Zach Cregger brings some much needed fun back to horror with a film that knows exactly what it is

I had so much fun with this film.

Anyone who’s been reading my reviews for a while probably knows that I used to be a huge horror fan. I grew up watching The Exorcist, The Omen, An American Werewolf in London and The Evil Dead at a ridiculously young age. (I can already hear my wife sarcastically saying: “That explains quite a lot.”)

But over time, I gradually fell out of love with the genre. Too many horror films started to feel repetitive, excessively violent or simply far too serious. Somewhere along the way, many of them seemed to lose that essential sense of fun I used to love.

Well, this latest Resident Evil has it in spades.

I should make it clear that my connection with the franchise is fairly flimsy. I played one of the video games many years ago, and I’ve seen none of the seven previous films.

Thankfully, none of that matters.

Zach Cregger’s film is essentially a fresh start: a self-contained story following Bryan, an ordinary medical courier who finds himself trapped in Raccoon City during a mysterious outbreak of zombie-like creatures.

Played by Austin Abrams, Bryan isn’t the usual indestructible action hero. He’s frightened, hopelessly out of his depth and constantly making mistakes. But he also learns from them, and Abrams gives him such an appealing mixture of vulnerability, bewilderment and determination that you genuinely care about what happens to him.

The story could hardly be simpler, and that simplicity is one of the film’s greatest strengths.

There’s no mythology to memorise, no cinematic universe to revise and no homework required before entering the cinema. You arrive, spend ninety frantic minutes trying to survive alongside Bryan, and leave.

Job done. Marvellous.

Cregger also makes clever use of the language of video games. The camera often follows Bryan from just over his shoulder as he moves from room to room. We get first-person point-of-view shots as he scans dark spaces from left to right, and the film is structured almost like a succession of increasingly difficult levels, with new locations, nastier creatures and slightly better weapons appearing along the way.

Bryan’s limited ammunition becomes part of the suspense too. Every missed shot matters. It’s all very simple, but extremely effective.

Most importantly, Cregger gets the tone exactly right. The film is properly tense and occasionally very scary (I jumped more than once), but it’s also unexpectedly funny.

Crucially, it never turns into a parody. The comedy doesn’t undermine the horror; it gives you a release before the film tightens the screws again.

You could, of course, dig a little deeper, and many critics have.

Bryan belongs to a generation that’s facing adulthood, fatherhood and responsibilities for which he feels completely unprepared. He’s also a low-paid worker helping to keep the American healthcare system running while remaining disposable to the corporations above him.

Even the endless keys, locked doors, forms, corridors and puzzles, straight out of the video games, can be read as a nightmarish version of modern bureaucracy: survival by red tape, with the Umbrella Corporation turning bodies into commodities and ordinary workers into replaceable cogs in the machine.

But honestly, you don’t need to think about any of that.

At heart, Resident Evil is a gloriously silly monster movie, designed to make you jump, laugh and grip your armrest.

Sometimes that’s all you need.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.