Resident Evil (2026) Review: Cregger's Claustrophobic

Bryan (Abrams) is a medical courier, the kind of job that sounds simple until you remember what gets transported after dark. One delivery goes wrong. Then the night itself goes wrong. What begins as a routine run collapses into a single, horrifying spiral in which Bryan is no longer delivering anything - he is running, hiding, and improvising his way through a city that has turned predatory around him. Along the way he crosses paths with Dave (Zach Cherry), Pauline (Kali Reis), Carl (Paul Walter Hauser), and Max (Johnno Wilson), each of whom is fighting the same nightmare from a different angle. The plot is deliberately lean: one man, one night, one escalating catastrophe. Cregger isn't interested in explaining the apocalypse. He's interested in what it feels like to be caught inside it.

The smartest decision here is scale. Cregger, coming off the one-two punch of Barbarian and Weapons, has built a reputation for turning ordinary spaces into traps, and Resident Evil gives him an entire city to play with while somehow making it feel like a locked room. The film runs a tight ninety-three minutes, and there is barely a wasted beat. Abrams carries an enormous amount of the runtime alone, and he's terrific - jittery, resourceful, never once playing the hero. His Bryan is a guy who survives because he keeps making slightly better decisions than the people around him, and Abrams sells every panicked calculation behind his eyes.

The supporting cast is a murderer's row of character actors clearly having a blast. Cherry brings an uneasy comic rhythm that makes Dave unpredictable rather than comic relief. Reis is all coiled intensity, a physical presence who changes the temperature of every scene she enters. Hauser, unsurprisingly, steals his sequences with a performance that swings from pathetic to genuinely unsettling without warning. Wilson rounds things out with a nervous energy that fits the film's escalating dread.

What separates this from the long line of video game adaptations is that Cregger treats the material as a horror film first and a brand second. The violence is visceral and practical-feeling, the sound design does heavy lifting, and the camera frequently refuses to show you what you're afraid of. There are set pieces here that will be talked about for months - one in particular involving a stairwell and a very bad idea - and they land because the film has earned its tension through patience rather than volume. The 9.2/10 TMDb rating currently attached to it feels like an audience responding to a movie that respects their intelligence.

If there's a knock, it's that the film's restraint occasionally works against it. Viewers raised on the franchise's larger-than-life mythology may find themselves waiting for a grander reveal that never quite arrives. Cregger keeps the mythology at arm's length, and while that's a bold choice, it leaves a few threads dangling by the credits. A slightly stronger final act would have pushed this from excellent to essential. Even so, this is one of the most confident, least cynical horror films of the year - a reminder that the best way to revive a franchise is to scare people again.

Pros

• Austin Abrams delivers a career-best, fully committed lead performance
• Zach Cregger's direction is patient, precise, and genuinely frightening
• Exceptional sound design and practical-feeling violence
• A lean 93-minute runtime with almost no filler
• Strong ensemble turns from Cherry, Reis, Hauser, and Wilson

Cons

• The mythology stays deliberately vague, which may frustrate franchise loyalists
• The final act doesn't quite match the intensity of the build-up
• A few supporting characters exit before they're fully developed

Resident Evil is not a nostalgia trip, and it isn't trying to be. It's a stripped-down, nerve-shredding survival story anchored by a tremendous lead turn and a director operating at the top of his game. Cregger has taken a franchise synonymous with excess and made it intimate, sweaty, and mean. Franchise purists might grumble, but everyone else should buy a ticket and try to keep their breathing steady. This is Hollywood horror firing on every cylinder - and easily one of the best wide releases of 2026 so far.