Resident Evil is a perfectly pitched distillation of videogame as movie. Zach Cregger’s approach moves like a game and I don’t mean that ugly. It moves like a game from a series that is steeped in cinematic horror. Resident Evil as a franchise is itself cinematic in the right way. The suspense is built out of set pieces and moments, the movement through horror so often linear and occasionally divertingly cheesy, as an ode to comedy horror classics.
What Zach Cregger understands is that adapting a videogame does not mean telling the contextual story the way only a game can — with player agency — and yet, finally, this is the first movie that captures the ethos of that concept very well on the screen.
How it does it is through very intentional sequencing. Helpfully Austin Abrams’ Bryan is a simple man. He’s not a member of STAR (Special Tactics and Rescue Service) nor an agent for the Umbrella Corporation. He’s but a simple courier boy on the verge of becoming a man. His quest begins with the transport of a special package he must deliver to the Raccoon City Hospital, driving across the snow-frosted mountain roads and into a city on the cusp of an all out apocalypse.
Resident Evil uses the same impulse for humor and horror. The setup and delivery come the same way. Both are grounded in an element of surprise. We’re reminded of the game series, where the most memorable moments subvert our player agency, creating dire situations which test our resourcefulness against grotesque creatures and bad odds of survival.
Zach Cregger captures not only the spirit of the game but also its iconography without any irony or reductive fan service. We still get fun stuff: repeated lock puzzles, rooms with typewriters, and requisite Resident Evil set piece tropes. Because Bryan is not a specialist, having only played some videogames, his best efforts don’t always result in success.
What Resident Evil captures, better than the off-the-wall Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich movies. To Cregger’s credit, he says he’s never seen the bloated action series that precedes his movie. Bless him.
When a filmmaker like Cregger makes their name on horror like Barbarian (2022) and Weapons (2025), our instinct is that this is the end. That’s the notion, usually, because this is when a director will make their “one for them” movie but also, taking that project could be deflating because we really need to see three films work for a director before we can buy in. Rest assured, though, that Cregger has not just met the moment and continued the great work of his last movies but is in an escalated filmmaking mode here, not just understanding the spirit of the game he adapts, but evoking contextual meaning unlike anyone really has in a game-to-film project before him.
Resident Evil exceeds the trappings of game-to-movie works because it understands horror cinema as well as it understands the beats of the videogames and it doesn’t think one aspect is more important than the other. What Hays and Ryan Holladay, the film’s composers, capture is how to evoke atmosphere through dark and brooding sustained synth sounds and bombastic echoing brass notes. It’s ethereal and suits the dark image of the Midwest industrial mountain town fallen into hell.
The way Resident Evil is shot by Dariusz Wolski mirrors the logic of videogame camera systems and framing dynamics. It’s in the slow tracking shots, the static close-ups, the way characters are framed in relation to their environment. It doesn’t feel disruptive to the filmic language, either, while the film has been shot for IMAX, and often goes wide, and captures spaces as liminal pathways which lead linearly to the Raccoon City Hospital. In this way, the film remains focused on both the journey and the destination, and never loses touch with the spirit of the thing along the way.
Resident Evil is a right-sized distillation of the classic videogame series which has, itself, always been more in love with cinema than its past cinematic entries may have suggested. Finally, the series gets to return home — so long ago, it all began with a Nintendo Entertainment System adaptation of Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Sweet Home (1989) — and now we feel closer to the impetuous, to the classic structure of the first couple PlayStation games that followed, and we have a new signifying example of how games can be adapted to film.