Resident Evil Movie Review 2026: Is This the Resident Evil Movie Fans Wanted?
TL/DR
Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is a lean, roughly 90-minute horror ride that gets the feel of the games right, and it’s my favorite of his films so far.
Austin Abrams carries the movie as Bryan, a panicky everyman whose reactions are exactly what you do when a Tyrant is on your heels.
The catch for longtime fans: the creatures and the outbreak have little to do with the games, so the Raccoon City and Umbrella names feel more like a label than a connection.
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I walked out of Resident Evil (2026) grinning. Zach Cregger, the director behind Barbarian and Weapons, made a movie that plays like a night with a controller in your hands: low ammo, locked doors, something huge stomping behind you, and a lot of yelling at the screen.
This review is for two kinds of readers. If you’re a fan of the games trying to decide whether to buy a ticket, the first half is spoiler-free and tells you what to expect. If you’ve already seen it and want to talk about how it lines up with the games’ Raccoon City, the second half covers the creatures, the lore, and the ending in full spoiler detail. There’s a clear warning before that part starts.
Resident Evil (2026) Overview
| Category | Details |
|---|---|
| Director | Zach Cregger (Barbarian, Weapons) |
| Lead | Austin Abrams as Bryan, a medical courier |
| Runtime | About 90 minutes |
| Rating | R |
| Setting | Raccoon City, during a viral outbreak |
| Connection to the Games | An original story that borrows the setting and Umbrella but not the game characters or creatures |
Spoiler-Free Verdict: Is Resident Evil 2026 Good?
Yes. It’s fast, funny, scary in the right places, and it never overstays its welcome. Plenty of horror movies pad themselves out past the two-hour mark. This one tells one small story about one guy over one terrible night, and it moves.
It feels like a Resident Evil game
The tone is right. So are the horror beats, the creature designs, and the sense that the main character is always one bad decision away from death. Umbrella is in the background, an outbreak is tearing through the city, and our guy keeps running into obstacles that look impossible to get past.
Cregger has said in interviews that his goal was to capture the experience of playing Resident Evil. As quoted by The Ringer, he described wanting to honor “the experience of watching somebody play Resident Evil badly.” Once you know that, a lot of the movie’s choices click into place.
Austin Abrams plays the player
Bryan is a medical courier hauling a package into Raccoon City, and he has no business surviving any of this. Unlike Leon or Jill, he has zero training. He screams, he panics, he blurts out nonsense mid-crisis.
I expected to want a more serious lead. Most of the protagonists we control in the games are stoic, quip-ready professionals. But Bryan’s freakouts are mine. When I’m playing and Nemesis comes crashing through a wall, or I’m scrounging for one more box of handgun ammo during a boss fight, I’ve been known to yell something that isn’t a word. Abrams turns that feeling into a whole performance, and he’s often hilarious doing it.
He’s the reason the movie works. You end up rooting for him hard.
The comedy Fits
There’s more humor here than you might expect from a Resident Evil movie. Most of it comes from Bryan reacting to the absurd situations he’s thrown into, and it releases tension without undercutting the scares. For me it was a great fit.
Easter eggs for game fans
If you’ve spent time with the games, you’ll spot a lot of nods:
A typewriter room, the series’ classic save point
Resource management, with Bryan rationing what little he has
A locked door and the wrong key, the eternal Resident Evil roadblock
Set pieces staged like boss fights against a single overwhelming creature
Camera angles and shots lifted straight from the games
Each one is built into how the story moves, which is how the games use them too.
How it compares to Barbarian and Weapons
I liked Weapons, and Barbarian even more. Resident Evil tops both for me. It’s the best-balanced film Cregger has made: well paced, tightly scoped, and fun from the first scene to the last.
If you want a pure verdict, stop here: go see it.
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SPOILER WARNING: Where the Movie Breaks From the Games
Everything below discusses the creatures, the lore, and the ending of Resident Evil (2026).
The movie is set in Raccoon City, and Umbrella exists in this world. But the events play out like an alternate reality version of the outbreak. The monsters Bryan faces and the story around them have little in common with what Leon, Claire, and Jill dealt with in the games.
The creatures: zombies that fuse into something worse
The movie does have zombies, at least at first. Kill or decapitate one, though, and root-like tendrils burst out of the body, grab any corpses nearby, and pull them together into a single creature made of several bodies.
It’s a fantastic idea. If a new Resident Evil game introduced these as an enemy type, I’d believe it instantly. That’s what I mean when I say the movie feels like Resident Evil. The design sensibility is spot on.
Umbrella is there, the lore mostly isn’t
The film keeps its attention on Bryan, so Umbrella’s role gets only a bit of exposition. Umbrella caused an outbreak, then developed an antidote to contain the problem it created. The specific virus never takes center stage. If the movie names the T-virus at all, it doesn’t make a point of it.
The table below compares the movie’s Raccoon City with the one from the games:
| The Games (RE2 & RE3) | Resident Evil (2026) | |
|---|---|---|
| Who’s Responsible | Umbrella | Umbrella |
| The Virus | T-virus, plus Birkin’s G-virus | Not a focus of the story |
| Creatures | Zombies, Lickers, Hunters, Tyrants, Nemesis | Zombies that fuse into multi-body monsters |
| Main Characters | Leon, Claire, Jill, Carlos | Bryan, an original character |
| Focus | Survival plus Umbrella’s conspiracy | One man’s survival, start to finish |
I’m completely fine with alternate stories, especially when a franchise jumps from games to film. My issue is that the movie uses the Resident Evil name, the Raccoon City setting, and Umbrella, then skips the parts of the outbreak fans know best.
Two ways it could have connected to the games
Either of these would have kept Cregger’s story intact while tying it more firmly to the series.
Option 1: A side story inside the Raccoon City outbreak. Keep Bryan and his night from hell, but fill the city with the creatures from the games. Regular zombies, Lickers, a few Hunters, maybe a Tyrant stalking him. His story becomes one more account of the same disaster Leon and Claire lived through.
Option 2: A sequel outbreak somewhere else. Keep the new creatures and the new virus, but move the action to a different city with a Raccoon City-style incident. Then tie it to Umbrella’s leftover research, or to another organization that picked up where Umbrella left off. That opens the door to a future game built around this incident.
The second option is close to what Amazon’s Fallout show did. It created new characters and new stories, but it’s set after the events of the games and treated as part of the same timeline. Fans got something fresh without losing the connection to the world they already loved. Resident Evil missed a chance to do the same.
The Ending: Bryan’s Transformation (Spoilers)
Early in the night, Bryan gets infected by one of the creatures. The infection progresses throughout the movie, and by the end it takes him completely. He mutates into a monster that looks a lot like William Birkin’s transformation after he injected himself with the G-virus in Resident Evil 2.
The creature design is great, and it would fit right into the games. Emotionally, though, it stung. Bryan was my stand-in for the whole movie, Abrams made him endearing, and I wanted him to make it out in one piece.
I don’t hate the ending. I’ve watched a lot of horror, and the genre has a long history of leaving its heroes in bad shape. A sour ending is part of the deal.
What bugs me is that the ending points at a bigger idea the movie doesn’t follow through on. In the games, you gun down monster after monster without knowing who any of them used to be. This movie gives us the full backstory of one of those monsters. If it had been written as canon, Bryan’s final form could be a creature the player, or Leon, or Claire, runs into during the Raccoon City outbreak. That would have tied the ending into the larger Resident Evil story and given the final scene even more weight.
Does It Need the Resident Evil Name?
As much as I enjoyed it, I don’t think it did. Change the title, drop the Umbrella references, and you’d have a terrific standalone outbreak movie that nobody would compare to the games. The Resident Evil name sets up expectations about Raccoon City that the story isn’t interested in meeting.
Still, I’d call that a longtime fan’s gripe, and it shouldn’t keep anyone home. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a Resident Evil film, and it gets the feeling of the games right even when it ignores the facts.
Recommended Picks
If the movie left you wanting more of the games it’s drawing from, or more Cregger:
Resident Evil 2 (2019 remake): The Raccoon City outbreak, Lickers, and Birkin’s G-virus transformation, all the things the movie nods to.
Resident Evil 3 (2020 remake): Jill’s escape from the city with Nemesis on her trail, and the best example of the “something huge is chasing me” panic Bryan lives in.
Barbarian (Blu-ray): Cregger’s breakout horror film and still a must-watch.
Weapons (Blu-ray): Cregger’s follow-up, a bigger ensemble mystery.
Related Articles
Resident Evil Timeline Explained Easily (Every Mainline Game Here), for anyone who wants the real Raccoon City story the movie borrows from, game by game.
Fans Can’t Get Enough Of Survival Horror Video Games, for a wider look at the genre Resident Evil helped define, from the 1996 original to the RE4 remake.
Amazon's Fallout Is Everything We Want In A Video Game Adaptation (Spoilers), the game-to-screen adaptation this review holds up as the model Resident Evil could have followed.
FAQ
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Loosely. It’s set in Raccoon City and Umbrella exists, but the story, the main character, and the creatures are original. It doesn’t follow Leon, Claire, Jill, or the events of Resident Evil 2 or 3. If you want the story the games tell, our Resident Evil timeline guide walks through it in order.
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No. Zach Cregger’s film is a fresh start, separate from Paul W.S. Anderson’s six-film series and from 2021’s Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City.
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No. The movie stands on its own. Playing the games does make the Easter eggs (the typewriter, the key hunts, the resource scrounging) a lot more fun.
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Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier who gets caught in Raccoon City during the outbreak.
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About 90 minutes, which makes it short for a modern horror movie.
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Both. The horror set pieces and creature designs deliver, and a lot of the comedy comes from Bryan’s frantic reactions.
Cregger understood what makes Resident Evil fun to play: the panic, the scarcity, the monster you can’t kill, and the small win of finding the right key. The movie bottles that feeling better than any adaptation before it. Where it falls short is in connecting that feeling to the world the games built, and that’s a fixable problem if Sony gives this version another night in Raccoon City.
If this sent you back to the games, the timeline is a great place to start. Read the Resident Evil timeline explained or watch the full timeline video on the ThyGeekdom YouTube channel, where I put every major event in order, and join out our email list and newsletter, PopPulse Digest, for more reviews and deep dives on the games, anime, and movies you love.