Resident Evil Movie Review:
Perhaps being completely engulfed in darkness isn't as terrifying as feeling a quiet presence in the patch of darkness at your periphery. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil (2026) understands that in order to deal with a global zombie outbreak, you don’t necessarily have to show civilizational collapse. All you need is the myopic vantage of a meek medical courier realising that life as he knows has ended, through the slow unravelling of a series of bizarre incidents. Cregger knows we know what to expect, given the genre's almost-century-old history. And he plays with it brilliantly. In zombie apocalypse films, the shock and awe is understandably accompanied by the despair of a crumbling world. In Resident Evil, this despair is dialled down while we are served with high-quality thrills. And Cregger does that by mixing calculated doses of whimsy. Even as we follow Bryan (Austin Abrams)’s innocence being violently shaken and his forced growth, the film isn’t in any rush to shed its lightheartedness. With the darkness dialled down, Cregger is free to play with the gore. There is a massive dose of adrenaline jammed straight into your heart every ten minutes.
Director: Zach Cregger
Cast: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Paul Walter Hauser
The premise is deceptively simple. Bryan has to deliver a high-priority package through a lonely, snow-capped mountain range. And sure enough, Bryan is also going through personal troubles, trying to save his relationship through phone calls. The way the world slowly unravels through the eyes of Bryan borrows its grammar from video game storytelling. You can see this from the way Bryan’s choice of weapons scales up from a pistol to a shotgun and a machine gun, and also how the ‘monsters’ start becoming more evolved. There is even a cheeky nod to video game influences in how Bryan encounters multiple padlocks and how they do not just pop open with a gunshot like they were supposed to in the games.
Resident Evil stands out from the several other films in the zombie genre not just for its whimsical tone but also for its delightfully gory monster designs, which are heavily inspired by John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). The sharp thrills of the first thirty minutes transform into the gory exploration of the viruses’ unique mutations. While the grotesque body horror elements, especially during the sequences when Bryan encounters the ‘monsters’ inside the hospital, are exciting to watch, the intimate horrors that made us jump up from our seats in the beginning could have been exploited more.
The film brings back a classic element of the horror genre that has perhaps gotten too much hate. There are several moments where you want to scream at Bryan, “Just run, what are you doing!” What is a horror film if you are not screaming at the screen, part terrified and part baffled by how stupid the characters are? Us, the audience, pretending we'd use our top cognitive abilities and make sound decisions while facing a giant ball monster made of limbs ripped from four different people, is almost a tradition in the horror genre.
Resident Evil (2026) is more than just thrills; it is more than just Bryan screaming his head off running away from one danger to another, but the film is smart enough to pretend it is not trying to do anything more than that. However, there is a sombre exploration of a man’s fear of becoming a father, how empathy could become our biggest vulnerability in the face of societal collapse, and the apathetic and yet all-consuming nature of capitalistic greed. It was interesting how the scientists, who created the virus, are almost naively ignorant of the destruction they have unleashed on the world. “I hope my mom is watching the news,” says one of the scientists as he prepares the antidote, while the film makes it abundantly clear that the world has fallen. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is entertaining because it dials down the despair endemic to the genre and dials up everything that could make you jump up from your seats.