Spooky season starts September 1 in this house, and we are not taking questions about it. The first big swing of the year turned out to be a Resident Evil movie that has zero interest in being the Resident Evil movie the internet has been demanding for twenty years. Zach Cregger drops you next to a guy with a package, a bad phone call, and wet socks. That is the whole pitch. It works.
Meaghan’s tagline for the film: “don’t lose your keys.” It makes a lot more sense the further you get in.
We should say up front that neither of us has played the games. Arthur has seen basically all the other movies and poked at a controller here and there, but there is no deep attachment on our end, no Leon Kennedy hill we were ready to die on. That probably shaped how much fun we had with this one. It also means the hype coming into it wasn’t really ours to defend, and we can tell you now: the hype is real, and it is legit.
What Resident Evil (2026) Is Actually About
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier. He drops something off at a hospital, has an awkward phone call with his girlfriend Michelle (who has just found out she is pregnant, and Bryan, let us be generous, does not handle it with grace), and then gets offered a second run that pays double because it is up in the middle of nowhere in the Colorado mountains. Raccoon City General. He takes it, obviously. Man is about to have a baby; man needs money.
Then he hits a woman who walks into the road. She is not fine. Nobody in this movie is fine.
Around Bryan is a small bench of Umbrella employees played by Zach Cherry, Paul Walter Hauser as Carl, Kali Reis, Will Merrick, Zoé Bellas, and Chris Lew Kum Hoi. Almost none of them get real screen time, and that is on purpose. People wander into Bryan’s night for two minutes, and then it is just him again. Sara Paxton also turns up as the voice of Michelle on the phone, which is her third appearance in a Cregger movie after Barbarian and Weapons, and at this point it is basically a tradition.
Our Resident Evil Scare Factor and Rating
Our scare factor has four settings: terrify me, creep me out, fun and wild, or wreck me. We both circled fun and wild, though Arthur pushed for something scarier because the jump scares got us more than once. On a level of scare (nightmare fuel, solid scares, or light), we landed on solid scares together.
Then the digs split harder than they ever have.
Arthur sits at an easy 8.5. It is nonstop, it is funny, it never drags. Meaghan came in at 6.5, and not as a knock. Her reasoning:
There isn’t really anything deeper going on in it, particularly messaging-wise. What you see is what you get.
That is not a criticism so much as a ceiling. It is a horror movie you can throw on at a party and not lose the thread if you look away.
There is a good bit of trivia that backs Meaghan’s read, actually. Cregger reportedly cut a chunk of jokes after test screenings because audiences found it too funny, then rewatched the trimmed version and decided it played better.
And apparently he wrote the thing as a generic horror script first, pitching it to Constantin Film under the Resident Evil umbrella, with the fallback being that if the IP was a no, it could have just been any horror movie. Which explains a lot about how it feels.
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The Creature Design Is the Best Thing in Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil
The character design is the standout, and it is not close. These are not the polite Resident Evil zombies who shuffle at you and drop when you clip them in the hand. These are closer to Mr. X in the games, covered in growths and tentacles, fusing together into walking balls of hands and arms and heads. Some of them puke acid. The final creature (we are not describing it, go see it) is better than all of it.
A lot of this looks practical, or at least practical enough that we could not tell where the line was, which is the goal. Meaghan kept flashing on Color Out of Space, specifically the fused alpaca thing, except this one moves. “It haunted you and shit,” is how Arthur put it, and yes, correct.
The sewer boss is the other one worth calling out. Enormous, wet, closer to the fat vampire from Blade than anything, and he explodes in a way that will make your row make noises. Arthur thinks the game equivalent is the Whopper zombie. Meaghan’s reaction to that:
Wow, they name it after a burger. Of course.
Pacing, Raccoon City, and a Stunt That Almost Went Very Wrong
The structure is the most video game thing about it. Hospital, road, farmhouse, Raccoon City, then the second hospital. You graduate from one space to the next like levels, and the movie keeps handing you upgrades along the way: a small handgun, then a two-shot hunting rifle, then a Uzi. There is a room in the farmhouse with a typewriter that got an actual cheer in our screening, which only lands if you know the typewriter is a save point in the game, and you need the ribbon to use it.
The street run from the trailer, with the infected dropping off rooftops and splattering around Bryan, was done practically. They hung 150-pound bags of blood and assorted gore off cranes; Abrams had to hit a specific speed, and one of the drops came down inches from him. If it had been a little closer, it would have killed him. They kept the take. It is in the movie.
Pacing-wise, the film never sits still long enough to explain itself into a corner. There is maybe a minute of breathing room before everything goes again. Bryan is carrying the last agent needed for the cure; he actually reaches the lab, they start trying to synthesize it, and the final scene happens. We knew the ending was coming and still did not feel the runtime.
Should Video Game Adaptations Go Off-Script?
This was our question of the episode, and the movie answers it for us: yes.
There are seven of these films already. The 2002 original was convoluted enough that Meaghan checked out of the franchise as a kid and never came back, and a recent rewatch did not change her mind. Doing an eighth straight-down-the-middle reboot would have been the boring choice.
Taking a side character, a nobody, a guy who does not know anything about guns or viruses or Umbrella, and setting him loose on the eve of the outbreak turned out to be the smarter one. It also leaves the door wide open. Once you have proven a stranger’s night in Raccoon City can carry a film, you can tell a lot of stories from a lot of angles and work your way toward the game characters later.
We have a screener of Beware Boiúna, Mike P. Nelson’s giant snake creature feature that opened Fantastic Fest and hits theatres October 2, plus a follow-up interview with Mike coming your way.
He was on the show before to talk Silent Night, Deadly Night, Wrong Turn, and his V/H/S segments, so go dig that episode out of the library. With Weapons, this, and Whalefall landing in October, we have to ask: Is Austin Abrams officially a scream king now? We are leaning yes.
Resident Evil (2026)
Directed by Zach Cregger · 95 min · R
Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier with a package, a bad phone call and no idea what he is walking into. His delivery to Raccoon City General drops him in the middle of Umbrella's outbreak, with mutating creatures, locked doors he cannot shoot open, and no useful skills. Zach Cregger's Resident Evil is an original story set on the eve of the Raccoon City nightmare.