Resident Evil (2026)

The Nicole Kidman AMC ad isn't that funny. It's melodramatic and goofy, but people are still clapping for it 5 years later and I don't understand how the internet decided this was the thing we were all going to performatively enjoy, the thing we'd recite and put on t-shirts in our Etsy stores. "Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this" is overwrought, but it's not a campy Tommy Wiseau-level letter from an aesthetic Twilight Zone. By the Susan Sontag definition of camp, the ad qualifies– it's a seriousness that fails– but what are we doing going this far over the top in our appreciation of it? Last Thursday night, I saw a small congregation stand up and cheer as 2021 Nicole Kidman recited her monologue. It made me wonder if maybe I'd been wrong to turn my back on religion. Had atheism and an almost complete lack of good politicians left my generation with nothing more important to look to and care about than this decade's "Whaazaaaaaaaap?" What have we left to believe in?

So anyway, the day before I fully committed to studying Christian Science, I saw Resident Evil. It's good. I can't say it's Zach Cregger's worst movie, because I haven't seen Miss March, but it's a significant step down from Barbarian and Weapons, two of my favorite horror movies of the past decade or so. But it's good.

Unfortunately, I don't find Resident Evil funny. It's more of an overt comedy than Cregger's last two films, but most of its jokes are "so that happened" and "fuck yeah, video games" stuff, the easy shots you take when adapting a property where unreal things occur. And Barbarian and Weapons were really funny, so the comedy's weakness here confused me. You know when you watch a Ryan Reynolds movie and you can see him getting the script and going "Hey, there are a couple lines where I'm not talking, can we fix that? It's probably a mistake the other characters are discussing something other than me in this scene and I don't get to say anything, so I'm gonna need you to add in a bit where I call my gun 'Ms. Boom Shaka Laka' or something." Resident Evil never gets there, but it also isn't as far away from that as I'd like.

Despite that, Resident Evil is the smartest video game adaptation you could make. The Resident Evil games are so full of anime bullshit (not necessarily a bad thing) and Romero rip-offs that when other people have tried to turn the series into films, they've tripped over tone. These are survival-horror games where you try to fend off zombies, but you also punch apart boulders as a member of a bizarrely stylish elite special forces squad. The first Resident Evil game takes place in a haunted house that turns out to be a front for a state of the art lab where a nefarious biotech company is creating giant zombie snakes. In Resident Evil 2, you can play as a giant hunk of tofu named Tofu. The series' overarching villain is a cross between a Nazi and Snidely Whiplash and he's killed in Resident Evil 5, the series' 14th game, when the player-character tosses him into a volcano. I don't think this is inherently bad, but the series is ridiculous.

That's how you get 6 Paul W.S. Anderson movies that start out as straight horror and then gradually give their Milla Jovovich protagonist wall-running slow motion kung-fu Matrix powers, until she's dual-wielding machine guns on a motorcycle in a Road Warrior desert. Or you strip the weirdness out and you make 2021's Resident Evil: Welcome to Racoon City, and all that's left are generic zombie tropes as connected to Dawn of the Dead or The Walking Dead or World War Z as they are Resident Evil. You adapt the tone and you end up with nonsense, you abandon the tone and you end up with nothing.

This new Resident Evil holds onto some of the tone, but it's mostly an adaptation of the feeling of playing Resident Evil. That's Cregger's brilliant move. He introduces Bryan (Austin Abrams, who still has a few years left to play early 90s Liam Gallagher) working as a courier for a hospital. The plot is based on watching Bryan do his job: he just has to get an important thing to important people. We learn he has a pregnant girlfriend he can't fully commit to, but you could fall asleep for the five minutes that's brought up and get as much out of the film as I did.

On the way to his destination, which turns out to be the Umbrella Corporation medical lab the big zombie virus came from, Bryan picks up progressively more powerful guns and has problems with limited ammunition and indestructible locks with coded keys. He/we are the butt of a dozen jump scares. When Bryan runs into new characters, they send him on fetch quests. He's in every scene and the camera is often behind his back or crammed up next to his head, mimicking a first-person perspective. Nobody rotates in place, walks forward in a straight line, stops to rotate in place and then continues in another direction, but most of the Resident Evil gameplay systems are represented here. And then there are a few direct nods to the games' iconography, i.e. a typewriter or the little Resident Evil 4 worms that pop out of zombies' necks after their heads have been blown off. If he really wanted to replicate the experience of paying attention to video games, Cregger could have hired a few men in your movie theater to loudly complain the studio was pandering to women who didn't even care about games. Some dude would lean over and tell you the casting director was too woke to hire actresses with bigger breasts.

And so the movie, having cut away everything but one character's quest to get from Point A to Point B, has a great pace. It slows down when it defines zombie rules, because these movies always need characters to be frightened when a monster they recently killed starts chasing them again, but I can't think of many horror movies where all the characters are prepared for and knowledgeable about the things trying to kill them. It's usually part of the genre, sadly– you're going to have to wait for the people onscreen to clock what you ascertained from the poster. Everything else here is streamlined.

In that way, Resident Evil is a perfect title. I mean, it's dumb. It's a very dumb name for anything. It's just "haunted house," right? Resident = house, evil = haunted. If the first game was about a different subgenre like slashers or Lovecraftian cosmic horror, it might have been called "Stabbing Adolescence" or "Metaphysical Heebie-Jeebies." When the first Resident Evil hit America in 1996, video games were nearing the end of their nonsense titles era, but so many game franchises, originally renamed by iffy localization teams, have kept going, so you somehow have companies spending millions of dollars on things called "Castlevania" and "Metal Gear Solid." Nintendo's still putting out games with Donkey Kong, whose name is a butchered King Kong/monkey pun. The first three Resident Evils were some of the PlayStation's best-selling games, so the company kept the series name, so 30 years later Target's selling Resident Evil shirts.

That's how it always works with things that take off on to this degree. "The Beatles" is a really corny pun, "Pokemon" is a portmanteau of "pocket" and "monsters" but you have to pronounce the first word wrong to make it work, Winnie-the-Pooh is the third-biggest media franchise in the world and nobody's ever bothered defining what a "Pooh" is. "Resident Evil" doesn't need to mean anything. It's the letters you type into the Xbox store when you want to download the series' newest entry.

So the biggest movie of September 2026 is Resident Evil, a word combo which means nothing in the film's universe, but is just connected enough to a video game series that you'll have an idea of what to expect from the story.

As a genre, zombies are apocalyptic in a way other monsters aren't. In almost any zombie movie, we're seeing one slice of large-scale devastation and we're made aware, even if only through a disconnected 9-1-1 line or some burning cars, that the body count is ten times what we're seeing on screen. That isn't the case with a slasher or kaiju series. The beginnings of zombie stories tend to be depressing because the monsters spread uncomtrollably. You can send one Godzilla back into the sea, you can kill one Jason Voorhees, but the expectation in a zombie movie is rarely the eradication of all zombies. The toothpaste squirts out of the tube. The goal is survival and damage control, not a return to what life was like before the dead began walking the earth. In a movie like Resident Evil, you watch the protagonist slip further and further away from any chance of reversal. This is probably why so many zombie movies are, structurally, closer to natural disaster blockbusters than they are ghost stories.

Spoilers and such follow.

The movie ends with Bryan, who's been slowly turning undead for half of the film, hulking out. He's a huge zombie monster, begging a room of cowardly scientists to inject him with the zombie cure, but they can't get their shit together and, against his will, he kills them all. The potential cure is lost, helicopters close in on Zombie Bryan and the credits roll.

I guess I'd like a more definitive ending, though it's clear Bryan's either about to be blown up or become fully zommed, and neither option would be satisfying to watch. The more accurate reason the end doesn't work for me is because it's a dedication to zombie tropes at the expense of video game ones. Containment's been broken and the zombies are going to tear the world apart, and that's fine, but Bryan turning is the first time he loses control, and that means in the movie's final moments, it's suddenly no longer about the feeling of playing a Resident Evil game. It's small, I'm not saying this is some thematic betrayal, but it's odd to stick to the formula so effectively for so long and then throw it away with seconds left to go.

I like how incompetent the scientists are. Every authority figure, with the exception of a police officer who gets killed pretty early, is similarly incompetent, and they're all from the Umbrella Corporation. The most capable Umbrella figure, a security guard played by Kali Reis, expertly dispatches a small zombie hoard and then makes the stupidest call in the film and idly walks into a dark warehouse, where she's torn in half.

We don't know what the virus Umbrella's unleashed was originally designed for, but we do get to see its creators, a room of condescending dorks, flail around, unsure how their well-intentioned tinkering produced Monster Hell. Their "move fast and break things" philosophy might have resulted in a new pharmaceutical but instead everybody in Raccoon City is eating each other.

That's AI. That's a bunch of developers with no sense of ethics or morality or empathy twiddling knobs until they managed to create a plagiarism machine that boils oceans and requires data centers that turn the skies of our poorest communities piss yellow. Oops. Now art and writing and South Memphis' inhabitants and the flyers at your local coffee shop and the pictures of your family you've uploaded to social media, all of those got fucked.

I don't think it's a coincidence Resident Evil's recurring zombie is a mess of limbs and tentacles, absorbing and assimilating everything it comes across. That's Paul Walter Hauser's face sticking out of the big zombie, but it doesn't belong to Paul Walter Hauser's character anymore.

Personal context, because the bias of a bad day cuts both ways: My family was supposed to move back into our house last Friday, and so spent the preceding week packing and prepping for that. And then on Wednesday, my wife got a stomach bug, so we spent hours in the emergency room. On Thursday afternoon, we found out our move had been delayed for the nth time, though only for one day, and we'd now get to return home Saturday. On Thursday night, I was exhausted from packing and angry about the delay, and I decided at the last minute to catch a late-night (for me, at this stage in my life (it was only 9:15)) screening of Zach Cregger's new Resident Evil.

Maybe Resident Evil gets some points for bringing me happiness at a rough time. Maybe it loses some points for coming when my mood was already at an all-time low. Maybe the two men next to me, who spoke to each other in Swedish all night, got me more annoyed at little things than I'd normally be, but maybe the absurdity of the situation granted the night a little joy. All art is at the mercy of your personal context, and my time with Resident Evil was profoundly off. I hope to never again see a movie on the second-to-last night of a 4+ month-long displacement rodeo. It's amazing I was able to enjoy Resident Evil at all.