Resident Evil (2026) Review: Zach Cregger’s Gory, Gleeful Fun
Resident Evil | Review | Hope Madden
Video game horror movies have a well-earned reputation for missing the point, playing it straight when the source material never did. Resident Evil, the long-running franchise that gave us zombie dogs jumping through windows and a virus with worse manners than most film executives, gets a proper corrective here from Zach Cregger. Cregger, the director behind Barbarian and this year’s Weapons, brings his gift for tonal whiplash to a segment set inside an overrun Raccoon City, following a hapless courier played by Austin Abrams as he tries to get a medical package to the local hospital in one piece.
Co-writer Shay Hatten, no stranger to stylish carnage after his work on the John Wick sequels, helps keep the mayhem moving at a proper clip. What follows is gross, funny, and entirely unbothered by good taste, which is exactly the register this franchise has always needed. Cregger never pretends the material is more than it is, and that honesty is what makes the segment work. This is not a review that promises awards season. It is a review of a film that knows precisely what it wants to be and gets there covered in goo.
Zach Cregger turns Resident Evil into a gleeful bloodbath, embracing every gross, video game inch of it while keeping a proper character at the centre of the chaos. It will never win an Oscar, but it earns its scars and delivers a genuinely good time.
Zach Cregger turns a Raccoon City delivery run into gleeful, gross horror comedy chaos.
A lot of people seem curious to know what Zach Cregger is doing following up Weapons—one of the most revered horror films of the last decade—with the seventh installment in a horror video game movie franchise. By the looks of Resident Evil, having a blast is what he’s doing.
Rather than offer another badass on a mission story, Cregger’s episode, co-written with Shay Hatten (John Wick 3 & 4, Army of the Dead), enters the newly overrun Raccoon City with a hapless courier (Austin Abrams) tapped to run an important medical package to the Raccoon City General Hospital. Things go from bad to worse to much worse to oh my god no pretty quickly in an impressive series of set pieces showcasing body horror, carnage, mutants, goo, and more.
Cregger’s direction is fresh and fun, building dread and releasing it with bits of humor. He gives us some nifty first person shooter POV, but not enough of it to become tedious. The camera lingers when you don’t expect it to, and turns away when you really hope it will.
Cregger never takes the film too seriously, which is usually the downfall of any video game adaptation. But he absolutely embraces the video game-ness of the film, digging into the grossest and most disturbing elements of the game while rooting the mayhem in a character you can care about.
Resident Evil is frequently funny without falling into camp. Abrams, who was such a standout comic force in Weapons, delivers an ideal doofus to root for. John Walter Hauser has a fun expository sharing cameo, and Zach Cherry is also pretty funny.
It’s also pretty gross, fast paced, tremendously violent, and harrowing in a fun way.
The unhinged horror of it all won’t surprise those of us who saw Cregger’s 2022 feature Barbarian. He’s a horror guy. He knows horror and he has fun with it while still leaving some scars. Resident Evil isn’t going to win anybody an Oscar, but it’s a good time.
Hope “Madd at the Movies” Madden, a graduate of The Ohio State University, is a freelance writer and co-founder of maddwolf.com. In addition to 12 years at the award-winning independent weekly newspaper The Other Paper, Hope has written for Columbus Monthly Magazine, The Ohio State University Alumni Magazine, is a published poet and fiction writer. She also currently writes for Columbus Underground, Screen Fervor and the UK Film Review.
Hope’s a member of the Critics Choice Association, the Online Association of Female Film Critics, Columbus Film Critics Association and the Women’s Film Critic Circle. She’s also on the Nightmares Film Festival jury. She co-hosts the weekly movie review podcast The Screening Room and the bi-weekly horror film podcast, Fright Club.
In Columbus, Ohio, you can catch Hope on TV every Friday morning on ABC6/Fox28’s Good Day Columbus.
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