From Space Invaders to Pure Terror: I Fell for Zach Cregger’s Blood-Pumping Resident Evil

★★★★☆

Dir. Zach Cregger

Starring: Austin Abrams, Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis, Zach Cherry

Runtime: 90 mins

Let me lay my cards on the table before the purists sharpen their pitchforks: I have never played a Resident Evil video game. In fact, if we are talking about electronic gaming of any description, my experience essentially began and ended in arcades pumping coins into Space Invaders, or was it Asteroids? Beyond that, modern consoles might as well be particle accelerators. Furthermore, I have never seen a single one of the half-dozen previous Resident Evil film adaptations. Hollywood’s long, dismal history of converting interactive software into coherent cinema has rarely inspired confidence, and life is simply too short for two decades of murky, leather-clad gunplay.

So what on earth possessed me to walk into a screening of the 2026 reboot? Exactly one word: Zach Cregger.  Maybe that's two words.

Cregger first blindsided horror aficionados with 2022’s brilliantly deranged subterranean chiller Barbarian, but it was his follow-up, the sprawling multi-strand dread-fest Weapons, that marked him out as one of the sharpest, most audaciously confident genre directors working today. When an auteur possessing that degree of mischievous storytelling control agrees to steer a battered corporate intellectual property, curiosity naturally gets the better of caution.

The gamble has paid off. Instead of suffocating the viewer under mountains of impenetrable gaming lore or trying to cram three decades of continuity into ninety minutes, Cregger takes a remarkably fresh, unpretentious approach. He strips the machinery down to the studs, delivering a lean, breathless, and wickedly fun survival thriller that works just as well for total novices as it presumably does for the joystick contingent.  

The premise is ruthlessly straightforward. Austin Abrams (reuniting with Cregger after his stellar turn in Weapons) plays Bryan, an ordinary, slightly harried medical courier caught doing one last late-night errand in a foul snowstorm. His mission is purely transactional: transport a time-sensitive cooler to the central hospital in Raccoon City. Unfortunately for Bryan, his arrival precisely coincides with a catastrophic viral outbreak that rapidly turns the populace into snarling, flesh-craving monstrosities. Trapped inside the sprawling medical facility alongside a trio of increasingly flustered corporate scientists and enforcers—played with delightful character-actor bite by Paul Walter Hauser, Kali Reis, and Zach Cherry—our everyman must find a way up, out, and alive.  

By placing a civilian at the helm rather than an elite, backflipping commando, Cregger anchors the pandemonium in palpable human frailty. Abrams doesn’t strike heroic poses; he panics, fumbles his boots on slick linoleum, drops his car keys, and looks genuinely appalled by the madness unfolding around him. It is a performance that gives the audience an immediate, relatable surrogate to cling to as his world, his environs and the hospital collapses into an abattoir.  

Where Resident Evil truly sings, however, is in its sheer, unadulterated sense of fun. While modern horror frequently bogs itself down in lugubrious trauma metaphors, Cregger is proudly interested in crafting an old-fashioned carnival ghost train. The pacing never flags. The film hurtles from one predicament to the next like a runaway carriage, punctuated by pitch-perfect black comedy and set-pieces that trade on giddy physical escalation.  

And good heavens, the jump scares! In the hands of lazy studio directors, a jump scare is a cheap insult—a sudden orchestral screech accompanying a stray cat leaping from a cupboard. Cregger, by contrast, treats the technique like high art. He weaponises silence, camera movement, and peripheral vision with fiendish precision. He will hold a static shot down an empty, flickering hospital corridor until your shoulders are up by your ears, tease you with a false release, and then hit you from a completely unexpected angle with an impact that practically lifts you six inches out of your seat. It is a tactile, communal cinema experience—the kind where the entire auditorium gasps in unison before immediately bursting into nervous, delighted laughter.

The creature designs are grotesque, the practical gore is dished out with generous, gloopy enthusiasm, and the sound design thumps through the chest like an erratic heartbeat. It loses a sliver of its momentum in the frantic third act, where a few monster mechanics feel slightly clipped in the rush toward the finish line, but that is a minor quibble for a film that gets this much right.

You don’t need to know your T-virus from your elbow, nor do you need to have ever held a controller to appreciate what Zach Cregger has assembled here. Resident Evil is a masterclass in popcorn craftsmanship: terrifying, funny, and utterly exhilarating. If only all Hollywood franchise reboots had this much life left in their veins.