‘Resident Evil’ movie review: 97 minutes is all Zach Cregger can spare for this monstrously good time

Zach Cregger turns one doomed delivery into an infectiously funny ‘Resident Evil’ speedrun. A certified Raccoon City banger

Updated - September 18, 2026 05:29 pm IST

A still from ‘Resident Evil’ | Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures

I am of the firm belief that the subgenre of Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day movies belongs in the Top 3 genres ever devised in the history of cinema, because there is something endlessly entertaining about watching an ordinary person discover that a manageable inconvenience has metastasised into a full-scale indictment of their existence. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is his After Hours, except Martin Scorsese’s nocturnal tribulations in Soho have been relocated to Raccoon City, where the night keeps taking increasingly grotesque T-virus liberties with the human form.

Cregger could have found no better Paul Hackett for this ordeal than Austin Abrams, whose Bryan seems forever one minor affront to his peace away from needing to lie down. He is a medical courier who takes an ill-advised final delivery through a snowstorm for some extra money, hits a woman with his car, discovers that she may be a zombie, gets stopped by a policeman, loses his car, and then spends the remaining 97-minute nightmare shooting at things with comical incompetence.

Bryan has the unfortunate occupational fatalism of a desperate gig worker, coupled with the survival instincts of an NPC whose principal contribution to the plot is usually a sad, little note explaining how he died. Cregger knows just how funny it is to perpetually keep him in that state, so every time Bryan acquires some semblance of control, the film periodically removes it again, usually by making him shoot at yet another comically indestructible padlock or whatever fresh biological nonsense Cregger has cooked up around the corner.

Abrams plays every stage of that humiliation with aplomb. It is genuinely difficult to think of another recent performance so completely calibrated to the specific idiocy of survival-horror. Most of his dialogue sounds like live commentary on his own impending death, with Bryan muttering and groaning to himself in consistent disbelief, making little verbal negotiations with the environment, screeching like a pterodactyl at every turn and attaching a charming succession of “f**k”s to approximately every available noun, verb and conjunction since the English lexicon doesn’t quite contain the adequate vocabulary for what is happening to him.

A still from ‘Resident Evil’ | Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures

The film had some serious franchise baggage to shake off. The six Milla Jovovich movies built their own action mythology around Capcom’s games for years, while Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City tried to steer the series back towards the first two titles. Cregger simply leaves most of that luggage behind. Leon, Ada, Claire and Wesker are nowhere to be found, and Bryan has absolutely no need to understand Umbrella’s sprawling corporate pathology before he can get through the next door. Some fans understandably bristled at that choice.

The funny thing is that Cregger seems to understand the Resident Evil games at the basest level of their most perversely specific habits. The typewriters and green herbs are obvious nods, but the gun and its ammunition being stranded in entirely different parts of the building is almost comically faithful to the games, where possessing a weapon and possessing the means to use it can feel like two unrelated achievements. Bryan keeps checking what he has, what he needs and what he can afford to waste, and Cregger understands that this inventory anxiety is part of the pleasure. Every bullet matters because there may be nothing behind the next door except something that might require six of them. There is a specificity to these little details that makes the idea of Cregger as some opportunistic Resident Evil larper just absurd.

We already knew Cregger had a particular knack for making horror funny without draining it of its unpleasantness. Barbarian frightened me more, while Weapons made me laugh harder, so the real achievement is the confluence of those two instincts while simultaneously rebuilding the very sensory experience of playing Resident Evil from scratch. The film makes you think about where you are, where you have been and what you can plausibly reach before something reaches you. Bryan is constantly forced to improvise around the physical world, and Cregger gives those little acts of problem-solving a ridiculous amount of tension because RE characters usually attempt them while terrified, injured, short on ammunition or being actively pursued by something menacing. That is the Resident Evil experience, and Cregger somehow gets there without borrowing its story.