I have never played Resident Evil. I'm not a video game person at all. I have enough time-consuming hobbies, thank you very much. I have seen most of the Resident Evil film series, though. I think the only one I've missed is Racoon City. I can't say the series is a favorite. It's the kind of thing I put on my tablet when I'm folding laundry. So color me surprised to find myself greatly enjoying the new (in 2026) Resident Evil movie from horror golden boy Zach Creggar, who turns out to have another gear for which I wouldn't have credited him. His first two movies are precocious, full of narrative tricks like multiple points of view, chapter stops, and chronological shenanigans that place them firmly in the art horror canon. This one is shorn of all of that. It's streamlined. Built for speed, even. I like that.
The new film follows Bryan, a medical courier who is cajoled into taking one last run on a night when the elements are against him. His destination is the medical center in Racoon City, Colorado, and the roads are iced up. He really ought to have chains on his tires for the run. Soon enough, a woman runs in front of his car and he hits her because it's too slick to stop in time. The woman doesn't die though, but rather continues on into the woods. Bryan finds her and straps her into his car to take to the hospital. It's his destination, after all. But then he's stopped by a sheriff's car, who is dubious of Bryan's relationship with the woman, but agrees to escort him to the hospital. Bryan suggests that the deputy take the woman in his car for appearances. The cop agrees. Soon enough, the cop's car veers off the road and flips on its roof. The cop is dead. The woman is out in the snow prowling for Bryan. Bryan liberates the cop's sidearm and shoots the woman, hitting his own car in the bargain rendering it useless. He hits the woman, but the bullet doesn't kill her. He flees to a nearby farmhouse, one patrolled by a guard dog. He escapes to the barn and contrives to trap the dog, but the dog turns out to not be entirely a dog. Its head splits into four-way jaws. Bryan enters the farm house and calls his girlfriend to summon help. They've been at each other over her pregnancy, and Bryan keeps saying the wrong thing to her. He fails to connect, so he leaves her a message. When she calls back, he can't answer because he's fending off the woman he hit and the lady of the house, who are both wrong somehow, like rabid animals. And after he blows the head off the first woman, the two women somehow merge. That's it for Bryan, and he flees post haste. The tunnel to Raccoon City is blocked by an RV, and all the cars are empty. There is evidence that something really bad has happened. In making his way through the RV, he comes upon a little girl who says her mother has bitten her. Her leg is turning into a tentacle. Bryan is obligated to flee once again. Once through the tunnel, he's picked up by a car with a representative of the hospital, who is very concerned about Bryan's medical cargo. Through all of this, Bryan still has it, and the rep tells him that it's not an organ, as Bryan has assumed, but the component of an antidote for the viral monstrosity that is raging through the city. They must get it to the top of the medical center before the National Guard arrives. There is one problem, though. Bryan was bitten by the little girl in the RV, and it's a race to deliver his cargo before the infection overtakes him...
Resident Evil has a familiar genre plot, one that made the leap to video games a long time ago. It has a name: "One Damned Thing After Another." It is so simple a plot that it works in something as abstract as Tetris or Tempest, where the threats keep coming and mistakes accumulate and compound each other. That's this film all over. The filmmakers have taken it back to its roots in horror and action movies. The form follows the function. This is essentially a first person shooter, where the main character is either the point of view directly or the character the camera follows over his shoulder. The film is disciplined about keeping the point of view until nearly the end of the film. Further, this is a film built on long takes, which further mimics the first person shooter. This is also a film that has discreet environments that correspond to the levels of a video game, and it places weapon stashes at various points throughout: the cop's gun, the shotgun at the farmhouse, the automatic weapon in the back of the car driven by the hospital rep, etc. What it lacks is the boss at the end of each level, but the film is so linear in its forward motion that one hardly notices the lack. The main difference between the film and a hypothetical game is the nature of the protagonist. Bryan is mostly incompetent. He doesn't know where the safety is on the cop's gun, he can barely load the shotgun because his hands shake so badly, etc. He is a far cry from the hyper-competent super soldiers that are often at the center of these kinds of narratives. He's definitely not Alice from the earlier Resident Evil movies. This makes Bryan relatable, a characteristic amplified by Austin Abrams performance in the lead. This is mostly a one man show, with the only other competitor for the audience's attention being brief scenes with Paul Walter Hauser as the man from the lab. Even so, Bryan's dialogue throughout the movie consists of variants of "what the fuck?" and "fuck this!", often as the audience is thinking the same thing. Abrams puts a properly panicked spin on the delivery of these lines and they get laughs. Comedy depends on timing and this film has impeccable timing. It's almost as if its director has a background in comedy. Go figure. All of this removes the film from the domain of the video game by virtue of having a recognizable and relatable character at the center. This is the filmmakers largest deviation from its sources (game and movie).
I like to think that this is a film that Howard Hawks would have liked. True, it doesn't have the community of professionals that Hawks preferred. Indeed, almost every major character in the film is incompetent to some degree, but the central character is a type Hawks liked: the man hellbent on doing his job. That provides almost all of the film's narrative engine. I don't think Hawks ever made a film with so singleminded a viewpoint, but he certainly made films with the same narrative economy. This is a film that throws everything over the side if it doesn't serve the main plot. It is purely linear, almost to the point of monomania. It does have a secondary plot, though. The bite from the little girl puts a clock on the film, and part of the horror is that clock running down and influencing the protagonist's actions. Moreover, Bryan is counting on the people in the hospital to know what's what and to be competent to stop it. His faith is misplaced. There is a commentary on the boundaries of science resting in the quality of the people doing that science at the end of the film, and in the era of COVID, that commentary carries some extra weight. And this crosses political boundaries. A right wing paranoid will look at the end of this film and see the lab leak hypothesis writ large, while someone on the left will see the incompetence of a president who suggested that people inject bleach to fight the infection. This is a film that waffles its politics, but it's ambiguous enough to get away with it. It foregoes the actual malice of the Umbrella corporation by hewing to Hanlon's Razor ("never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"). This, too, places the film more firmly in the real world.
Humor and relatability are key elements in a movie that goes off the deep end when presenting its monsters. Resident Evil is replete with abominations that would be the envy of any body horror enthusiast in the 1980s. The designs are all descended from Carpenter's The Thing and various David Cronenberg movies, but familiarity is subsumed under the film's execution. It knows what it's doing even if one scene reminds me of the Blair-monster from Carpenter's film and another reminds me of the hatching of the parasites in Slither. The film's final boss monsters, particularly the ones mutated from the inhabitants of a maternity ward, manage to achieve a gross out quotient uniquely their own. The puking monster in the elevator shaft is an inspired remixing of the acid blood from Alien, while the little girl in the RV could easily be an inhabitant of Lovecraft's Innsmouth. I don't mind the echoes of other stories. It's the nature of genre.
Resident Evil has enough on its mind that it's not only a ride movie. It has things to say beyond providing jump scares and uneasy laughter. But it doesn't let those things overwhelm the narrative. Its concerns are like salt on caramel. It doesn't change the flavor. It just adds depth. I had a splendid time watching this with an audience. I have no idea how this will play to a single viewer watching it on streaming. Some movies are crowd movies. I think this might be one.
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