It’s an incredibly low bar to say something is the best video game movie ever. Granted, there have been some better attempts in more recent years, with the solidly hilarious and often emotional Sonic the Hedgehog, or the perfectly serviceable Super Mario Bros. Movie, or the actually excellent Werewolves Within. But what director Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil reboot brings to the table is that it’s not just (arguably) the best video game movie ever made, it’s the most successful movie at aping the experience of what it’s like to play a video game.
The trick there, and something that’s been played on to varying degrees previously, is that video games put the player in the emotional state of the character they’re playing. That’s extraordinarily difficult to do with a film adaptation because it’s the filmmaker, not the viewer, who controls the experience. HBO’s Last of Us attempted to evoke the play style of the games by mirroring shots from the source material, and 2005’s ill-fated Doom included first-person-shooter style shots but neglected to flesh out the story around them.
Cregger – along with co-screenwriter Shay Hatten – tries something a little different. While Resident Evil is peppered throughout with a copious use of over-the-shoulder or POV shots that do feel like they’re ripped right out of a video game, they deliver what is in essence a 95-minute-long playthrough of a Resident Evil game that doesn’t exist, with star Austin Abrams as the stand-in for the player, or possibly a very out of his depth Twitch streamer, depending on the moment. It’s the sort of approach that could not have worked even a few years ago, but increasingly video games are meant to be interacted with online… It’s not about the arcade (to throw it way back to the ‘80s), or often even winning the game so much as how video game fans will “play” a game by watching a walkthrough on YouTube. It’s like audiobooks to books; another way of experiencing the media, and with the right streamer at the helm it becomes as rewarding an experience as finishing the game yourself.
That’s what works so well about Resident Evil… Abrams has made his career at playing a pretty normal guy, from being the one non-insane person on HBO’s Euphoria, to the sweet romantic lead on Netflix’s Dash & Lily. He’s played the a-hole before on The Walking Dead, and even a tweaked out drug dealer in Cregger’s previous hit, Weapons. But in nearly every case, he looks like any guy on the street. Or, more to the point, any guy you might see walking into GameStop to purchase the next Resident Evil game so he can chill out over the weekend.
Basically, he’s your run-of-the-mill video game player, something that even becomes a plot point in the film (briefly). And since I’ve gone several paragraphs without addressing the plot, let’s rectify that. Abrams is Bryan, a medical courier who has just discovered his girlfriend is pregnant. Instead of having a conversation with her in person on what to do about that, he takes a job paying double the money to ferry an important medical package to the snow-bound town of Raccoon City. Skidding in the road, he accidentally hits a woman who has stepped into the street with his car, and things go figuratively and literally downhill from there.
Along the way to Raccoon City, things got more and more horrifying as Bryan encounters monstrosity after monstrosity. Resident Evil is ostensibly a zombie franchise, and there is the requisite “bite that someone keeps secret,” but the twist is that the t-Virus accidentally released by the evil Umbrella Corporation causes out of control evolution in the hosts. So you get tentacles spewing from a dog’s mouth, and what one might describe as a tangle of limbs chasing Bryan through the woods. Also, much worse under the city, as well as when he – mild spoiler here – eventually reaches the hospital that is his destination.
Cregger does a nice job of keeping several balls in the air throughout the brief running time of the film, including Bryan’s fear of parenthood. You can see the metaphor right on the surface: that he’s afraid of something growing inside his girlfriend, and becoming a parent himself; and so he comes face to face with out of control growth and evolution, his fears made physical. As with Cregger’s previous features, Barbarian and Weapons, he backs away from saying anything really explicit about the subject, relying instead on humor and gore, and ultimately can’t quite stick the landing (the final minutes of the movie could easily have come from the much, much sillier Milla Jovovich version of the movie series). But there’s enough focus on the central metaphor that by the mere presence of any thought whatsoever elevates this over previous stabs at the franchise.
It also is extremely funny. Not to keep calling out his previous features, but both Barbarian and Weapons amped up tension immeasurably for most of the film before sliding into purposeful goofiness as an emotional release. Resident Evil, meanwhile, is laugh out loud funny throughout, including a particularly hilarious guest turn by Paul Walter Hauser as an Umbrella Corporation suit. Reportedly, the early cut of the film was even more joke-filled, and I’d personally love to see that cut just because the sketch comedy trained Cregger is really leaning into it here. But for horror fans, what we actually see on screen spends equal time on solid jump scares and putrid gore as there are ludicrous moments.
But by far the strongest aspect of the movie is the playthrough idea, as Bryan is thrust into a series of puzzles despite being a “real” human being who doesn’t know how to use guns, and is completely unprepared to be thrown into this situation. There’s a great bit about two-thirds of the movie where he encounters Maxine (Kali Reis), who functions as what one expects a character in these movies to be like, and the contrast is delightfully pointed. There’s a ladder puzzle, a recurring bit with padlocks and hidden keys, and a sequence in an elevator that I would swear I’ve played a variation on before. Watching someone play a video game – or in this case, experience it – has never been so fun.
Look, is this on the level of fresh creativity we’ve come to expect from Cregger thanks to Barbarian and Weapons? No. It’s a Resident Evil movie, and as noted above it ultimately skews back to formula by the end. But coming a year after the Oscar winning Weapons, this amounts to a palate cleanser, a throat clearing from Cregger that features some excellently staged sequences, a lot of laughs, and a strong central performance from Abrams. It may ultimately end up being a mere footnote in Cregger’s eventual award-winning filmography. But on the list of movies inspired by video games? It’s top of the charts.
Resident Evil hits theaters on September 18, 2026.
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