Resident Evil Is a Fleet, Entertaining Zombie-Filled Reboot

If Zach Cregger’s career tells us anything, it’s that starting out as a comedian might be the best training for becoming a horror filmmaker. Cregger’s 2022 surprise hit (and directorial debut) Barbarian paved the way for an even bigger success, 2025’s Weapons, a well-written, intelligently directed picture featuring sterling performances from Julia Garner, Josh Brolin, and most of all Amy Madigan, who won an Academy Award for her role as Aunt Gladys, an unctuously polite polyester-pantsuit-wearing costume jewelry addict who also happens to be a witch, having lured a town’s schoolkids away in the middle of the night for her own nefarious purposes. So many contemporary horror films lack a sense of humor, about the world or about themselves. But Cregger, a founder of the comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U’Know, gets that it’s an essential ingredient. Weapons, despite its overarching aura of dread (and more than a few mildly traumatizing visuals), didn’t come at its audience like a doomy thundercloud. Instead, it found ways to lure us in, with scattered morsels of terror as well as laughs. And unlike too many modern horror films, it featured a confident, definitive ending that was both mortifying and funny, the exact opposite of the carelessly worked-out wrap-up we so often get. Cregger didn’t leave you wondering what the heck you just watched—or, worse, wondering why you’d invested the time.

His latest film, Resident Evil, a riff on the enduring and now practically antique Japanese video game, isn’t as clever, funny, or grimly haunting as Weapons—but then, it’s simply a different type of beast altogether. The picture is loose-limbed and rambling by design, a kind of shaggy-dog story that reflects the experience of maneuvering a character, via a controller, through a landscape of obstacles. And while some fans of the game have complained that Cregger has failed to include their favorite characters, he has perhaps wisely decided to focus on one: Austin Abrams, who portrayed the drug addict James in Weapons, plays Bryan Hodukavich, a hapless medical courier charged with transporting a very important parcel to far-away Raccoon City General Hospital, which can be reached only by driving across treacherous, icy mountain terrain. His ramshackle vehicle slips and slides on the slick roads, and his headlights flash on the figure of a wild-eyed, bloodied woman just as he hits her.

We know, though he doesn’t seem to, that she’s a zombie lady. Stricken with horror at what he’s just done, he locates the woman—she was hit hard enough to be thrown into the woods nearby—and bundles her into the passenger seat, barely taking note of the fact that she’s shoeless and wearing a sleeveless floral dress in the middle of winter. As he drives, frantically, she repeatedly reaches toward his face with her clawlike fingers, as if to caress him; each time, he fails to notice, and she draws back abruptly, her glassy eyes registering nothing but raw need. It’s a predictable yet somehow hilarious gag, and Andrea Miltner, as the zombie woman, does a lot with a little.

The mishaps pile up one by one: a state trooper stops Bryan for speeding, and reluctantly agrees to transport the zombie woman in his own vehicle—a good solution but, as it turns out, only a temporary one. Other stuff happens. Bryan must race across a fenced-in field, pursued by a dog—which is of course not exactly a dog. He’s thrilled to have located a shotgun in what looks to be a deserted farmhouse—he’s just got to find some ammo learn how to load the thing. Later, he’ll encounter a duo of travelers (Paul Walter Hauser and Kali Reis) who inform them they’re representatives of a shadowy group known as the Umbrella Corporation, and they reveal the significance of the package he has been protecting so gingerly. (Previously, he’d been convinced it was a tiny heart destined to save the life of a child.) Amid all this, he worries about a cellphone call he’d received earlier from his girlfriend, informing him of a potentially relationship-changing situation. He’s desperate to get back to her, but he can’t get a signal. And over and over again, he’s flummoxed by a single, ancient device: he encounters one padlock after another, but of course, he’s never got the key.

Naturally, as the story moves forward, the zombies begin piling up in alarming quantities. To describe the creatures in detail would be giving too much away: let’s just say, for now, that there are slimy tentacles involved, and vomit and pustules also make an appearance. Resident Evil is largely a one-man show, and Abrams carries it deftly. In the movie’s early scenes, his eyes have a checked-out quality; he’s like an absentee participant in his own life. But as the action, and the danger, intensifies, he becomes more and more alive. By the end of this movie’s fleet 90 minutes, his battle seems unwinnable, and Cregger and his co-write Shay Hatton leave him almost literally hanging, begging for a sequel. The Resident Evil gestalt has been interpreted in movie form before, in the series of pictures made by Paul W.S. Anderson in the early 2000s through 2016; a ten-year gap is certainly a reasonable length of time to warrant a series reboot. In the meantime, although Bryan’s fate is unknowable, Resident Evil leaves you satisfied enough. Time, as we measure it in movies, has already proved that zombies aren’t going anywhere. We need them even more than they need us.