Resident Evil (2026)

A courier with a parcel is a modest sort of hero, and I warmed to him more than I expected. In Resident Evil, Bryan (Austin Abrams) is asked to deliver a package to a hospital, and the night that follows swaps his delivery schedule for an outbreak, a race to survive, and hordes of mutated creatures. Zach Cregger, fresh from Barbarian and Weapons, wrote it with Shay Hatten as an original story with no ties to the earlier films. A clean slate sounds attractive, but I arrived with those films in my head, and they set the yardstick. It’s a brisk 90-odd minutes.

Abrams carries most of the weight. He plays Bryan as a man who has no idea what he has walked into and doesn’t pretend otherwise, which gives the early scenes a sweaty, human panic. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser turn up along the way, and each gets a moment or two. None gets a person to play. They arrive as obstacles with faces and leave the same way, and I kept wanting one of them to matter beyond the next doorway.

I’ve never played the games, so I know this series the way plenty of people do: through the films, and above all the early ones with Milla Jovovich. Those were built around Alice, a heroine who set the terms of each fight. Whatever else you say about them (and there’s plenty to say), the monsters had a real opponent. Cregger has gone the other way. Bryan fights just as hard, but he only ever responds, lurching from one crisis and confrontation to the next with almost no say in where the night goes. The film seems to argue that an ordinary man reacting makes more immediate horror than a heroine acting. It might, if the reacting felt real.

For me the reacting never felt real, because the film felt like a game from the start. The idea was plain: viewers are meant to relate to it as a game they already know, and I could feel the design at work. Crisis, confrontation, a door, the next crisis. Each set piece seemed to exist so Bryan could clear it and the film could load the next, and once I’d noticed the pattern I stopped believing his life was truly on the line. Existential dread needs a person with everything to lose. A level to get through isn’t that, and my engagement, fear, and tension drained away with it.

With no Alice to cheer for, Cregger leans on the gallows humour he’s known for. Sometimes the laugh lands and the fear deepens with it. More often I felt the pressure let out of the room just as it had begun to gather, and a film that keeps lowering its own tension can’t convince me anyone is in danger. Comedy and dread can share a scene (Shaun of the Dead proves it), but they need to take turns. Here they talk over each other.

The pace cuts both ways. The Jovovich films handed you a world: a secret underground complex beneath Raccoon City, then the whole city sealed under quarantine, and Umbrella, a corporation you could happily hate. This one hands you a night and a hospital, and at this speed there’s no time to build more.

I left with a divided verdict, the sort where what I admired and what let me down weighed about the same, and neither got the last word. Abrams is worth watching. Next to the early Jovovich films, though, this is the lesser thing: less world, less menace, and less reason to fear for anyone in it. Fans of Cregger’s humour, or anyone happy to see the series start over, will get a lean hour and a half, and a cheap ticket or a rental seems the right price. If you want pulpy momentum or sustained dread, look elsewhere.