The new Resident Evil (now streaming on VOD platforms like Prime Video) might not matter in the slightest if it wasn’t directed by Zach Cregger. The filmmaker, possibly the best in the horror biz right now thanks to Barbarian and unforgettable masterpiece Weapons, brings his considerable skill to a dumbass reboot/spinoff/one-off/whatever of video-game IP that seemed to have exhausted itself with seven previous movies, most of them starring Milla Jovovich. She’s not in this one, replaced by Weapons’ Austin Abrams, and the genericisms of past outings are subbed out for a clever melange of big crazy laughs and fraught tension.

The Gist: Let’s talk about this Bryan (Abrams) character. We meet him in medias res during a phone call with his girlfriend, dropping the news that she’s pregnant. Unexpectedly. The manner in which he good-heartedly, but also stupidly, bumbles his way through the conversation is emblematic of how he good-heartedly, but also stupidly, bumbles his way through everything in this movie. He’s not a bad dude, but he definitely isn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier. 

He works as a medical courier, delivering transplant organs between hospitals, and he finds himself in a tight spot when he should be at home talking to Michelle (phone voice by Sara Paxton) about pending parenthood, but is inclined to take one last high-priority delivery tonight, thus prompting him to say he’s saving someone’s life while at the same time earning double pay. I’m not so wise as to determine what is more or less right or wrong here, which is to say Bryan doesn’t know either.

He also doesn’t know what he’s getting into as he drives down a dark, winding, snow-covered road that his little Subaru is not outfitted to traverse. Bryan tries to explain himself to Michelle over a spotty phone connection when WHAM — he hits a woman with his car. Thus begins a series of unfortunate occurrences compounding one upon another in a movie-plot structure I like to call a Misery Fugue. You know, nothing can be so bad that it can’t get incrementally, sometimes exponentially, worse. 

There’s an incident with a cop and one with a dog and one with an older couple in a farmhouse and one with a little girl in an abandoned RV and it goes on, getting increasingly disgusting with every passing moment. Meanwhile, there are signs of apocalypse everywhere. Bryan doesn’t seem to think too hard about the big picture, though. We stick to his POV as he tries to get the valuable package to Raccoon City General Hospital, so the big picture clearly isn’t important to this loosey-goosily plotted movie as each bizarrely scary-hilarious individual moment is. A couple of characters, one played by Paul Walter Hauser, do turn up about halfway through to explain a couple things if you need that, but trust me, you really don’t. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? What makes Resident Evil Twenty Twenty-Six so fun? It’s inspired more by John Carpenter’s The Thing than any other Resident Evil movie

Performance Worth Watching: Few things are funnier on-screen in 2026 than Abrams muttering exhortations of disbelief to himself under his breath for 90 minutes.

Our Take: Cregger takes two creatively threadbare genres (zombie flix, video game adaptations) and similarly wearisome IP (one could argue there are six-to-12 too many Resident Evil games and movies) and produces a highly entertaining movie by directing the living shit out of it. The screenplay, by Cregger and Shay Hatten, pays dutiful and inspired homage to the idea of video games by structuring itself as a series of set pieces to be survived, with a shrug in the general direction of any high-concept overarching plot — there’s a barely subtextual nod to parental anxiety that might touch a nerve — punctuated by a moment in which Abrams triumphantly bellows, “Yeahhh! Video games! Yahoo!”

Which isn’t to say the film isn’t a nihilistic, mean and nasty outing, unapologetically so. The lack of hope is balanced out by Cregger prioritizing laughs, scares and disgust, in that order. He turns the problem-solving tropes of horror films and video games into running gags and potent visual punchlines — shooting a padlock isn’t as easy as it looks, y’know — and Abrams’ blend of pea-brained bewilderment and survivalist instincts keeps us engaged and cackling. He has a tendency to gawk wide-eyed and mouth-agape as nasty nasty shit happens instead of running away, which is exactly what you’ll do while watching this movie.  

Our Call: Cregger assures Resident Evil is little more than an exercise in perverse joy. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.