Resident Evil (2026): Please Stop Walking Toward the Horrible Noise

Follows a hapless courier tasked with delivering a package to a remote hospital. He soon finds himself caught in the middle of an outbreak and must fight through hordes of mutated creatures to survive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNd1gb19A-c

Resident Evil has been around for thirty years, which means we've officially reached the point where a video game franchise can have a midlife crisis.

And apparently its solution is zombies.

Again.

Director Zach Cregger, the guy behind Barbarian and Weapons, has taken his swing at Resident Evil, and I've got to give him this: the man understands atmosphere. He knows how to make darkness feel like something is standing in it. He knows how to stretch silence until you're mentally begging somebody to turn on a light. And he knows exactly when to introduce something horrible into the frame.

What I'm less convinced of is whether anyone in this movie has the survival instincts God gave a squirrel.

The setup is wonderfully simple. Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, is a medical courier who gets sent on a delivery to Raccoon City and discovers that his evening is about to become considerably more complicated than the GPS suggested.

That's really all you need to know.

Because this isn't Citizen Kane with zombies. Bryan gets dropped into a nightmare and has to survive it.

And when Resident Evil sticks to that formula, it works.

Cregger creates some genuinely good tension sequences. The cinematography is dark—sometimes really dark—but here it actually serves a purpose. This world feels damp, abandoned and diseased. Rooms don't look empty. They look like they're waiting.

There are also some wonderfully creepy characters scattered throughout the movie. You know the kind. The person appears on screen and immediately triggers that primitive little alarm buried somewhere in your brain that says, "Dan, perhaps we don't accept lemonade from this individual."

That's the Resident Evil I wanted.

Unfortunately, there's another horror lurking in Raccoon City.

Bad decision-making

Holy mother of Umbrella Corporation, these people are dumb.

Not normal horror-movie dumb, either. Horror movies require a certain amount of stupidity because if everyone behaved rationally, most of them would be twelve minutes long.

"There's screaming coming from the basement."

"I'm calling the police."

ROLL CREDITS.

I accept some foolishne

But Resident Evil repeatedly had me sitting there thinking, "There is absolutely no functioning adult who would do this."

People investigate things that shouldn't be investigated. They remain in places that should have been abandoned yesterday. Danger announces itself with the subtlety of a marching band and characters still seem surprised when something bad happens.

If IQ points were ammunition, this group would have been out of bullets before the opening credits.

Speaking of ammunition, Cregger clearly loves the games.

And I mean LOVES them.

The movie is stuffed with references to Resident Evil history. Some are subtle enough that longtime players will catch them while everyone else keeps munching popcorn.

Bryan searching drawers for shotgun shells echoes one of the most basic pleasures of the games: rummaging through everything that isn't nailed down because somewhere inside Grandma's underwear drawer there might be twelve rounds of buckshot.

There's even a box resembling the Heavy Field shotgun shells from Resident Evil 4.

Then there's the green herb.

Resident Evil fans know exactly what that means. For thirty years these magical little salad ingredients have been patching up wounds that would normally require several surgeons and possibly a priest.

There's also a typewriter tucked into the scenery, another nod to the original games where typewriters served as save points. Veteran players will remember the ritual: find typewriter, check ink ribbons, save game, immediately feel suspicious because the game has clearly given you a safe room for a reason.

These touches are fun.

But eventually I started wondering whether Cregger was making a Resident Evil movie or emptying a Resident Evil memorabilia cabinet onto the screen.

That's one of my biggest problems with it.

It tries too hard to cram the fandom into one package.

The references stop feeling like little rewards and occasionally start feeling like the movie elbowing you in the ribs.

"Remember THIS?"

Yes.

"How about THIS?"

Yes.

"GREEN HERB!"

I SAW IT.

There's a difference between understanding the source material and constantly reminding me that you understand the source material.

The gore has a similar problem.

I'm certainly not opposed to violence in horror. Resident Evil without blood would be like John Wick without ammunition.

But gore works best when it adds something.

Sometimes the anticipation of seeing something is considerably worse than actually seeing it. Cregger builds several scenes where the stress is already doing the heavy lifting, only to throw another bucket of human marinara sauce at the screen anyway.

You had me already.

Trust the tension.

The imagination is still the greatest special-effects department ever created, and it works for free.

That's what makes this Resident Evil frustrating, because underneath my complaints is a pretty decent horror-action movie.

The action works.

The atmosphere works.

Several scares work.

The creature design works.

Austin Abrams works as the ordinary guy caught in an extraordinary nightmare, and that basic premise gives the movie something previous Resident Evil adaptations sometimes lost beneath laboratories, conspiracies, super-soldiers and enough Umbrella Corporation mythology to require an HR orientation seminar.

There's something refreshingly simple about watching one guy just trying to get through the night.

And perhaps that's why the stupidity bothered me so much.

When your protagonist isn't Superman, his intelligence becomes part of his weaponry. Resourcefulness matters. Observation matters. Making smart choices matters.

If your hero is physically vulnerable AND keeps making decisions that would get him eliminated from a neighbourhood watch program, eventually I'm not frightened for him.

I'm evaluating him.

This movie also arrives during the 30th anniversary year of the original 1996 Resident Evil game, which makes all those little references more understandable. It's a birthday party for the franchise.

I just wish someone had told Cregger you don't have to put every decoration you own on the cake.

Give me the creepy house.

Give me the mysterious noises.

Give me the limited ammunition.

Give me the monsters.

Give me that wonderful Resident Evil feeling where opening a door feels like signing a waiver.

But most importantly, give me characters whose survival strategy consists of something slightly more sophisticated than walking toward the horrible noise.

For me, this one gets 6.0/10.

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