Film Details:
Title: Resident Evil
Original Release: 2026
Director: Zach Cregger
Writer: Zach Cregger, Shay Hatten
Producer(s): Robert Kulzer, Zach Cregger, Roy Lee, Miri Yoon, Carter Swan, Asad Qizilbash
Starring: Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, Johnno Wilson, Paul Walter Hauser
Running Time: 95 minutes
Genre: Horror • Action • Science Fiction • Survival Horror
Certificate: 15 (UK)
Available On: In Cinemas
Dave (Zach Cherry) needs to stop working for evil corporations, man. Severance, Fallout, now Resident Evil.
I never expected we would get a (really) good live-action Resident Evil movie, but i'm incredibly glad this one passed with Umbrella colours.
Yeah, main dude kept poking fun at the situation like "ha ha, what is this? some kind of video game?", and some of the conversations slightly dipped into "she's coming back, right?" humour. Although, paradoxically, I did feel the humour was organically pretty good from main dude. I'd only take a half-star away because of the seemingly-rushed ending and how tonally off it felt (cool ending shot aside).
Even when I watched Barbarian, I got Resident Evil vibes from certain scenes and it's cool to see that carry forward with numerous cutesy references from the games. Literal heart-pounding first-person views were great, and a lot of the interior shots felt claustrophobic and nerve-wracking.
For a live-action adaptation of Resident Evil, I much prefer following average, dweebs interact with all these absurd BOWs. It did not bother me at all that we didn't see any legacy characters like Chris Redfield, since Cregger's Resident Evil is not that kind of movie. I feel that in the long-term, this adaptation will age better than any of those legacy Resident Evil movies from before that just tried to copy and paste characters and monsters with no rhyme or reason.
Themes: Survival • Isolation • Fear • Infection • Transformation • Resourcefulness • Humanity • Desperation
Verdict: ★★★★½
Worth Watching? Yes. Resident Evil abandons the sprawling approach of earlier adaptations and returns to the claustrophobic survival-horror spirit of the games. Zach Cregger builds the film around an ordinary man trying to survive an increasingly nightmarish situation, with horror, dark humour and some spectacularly gruesome practical effects along the way.
Final Thought: Resident Evil understands that survival horror works best when the hero is not trying to save the world—he is simply trying to make it through the next door alive.
After the Credits is an Opinion feature of the Jewish Dispatch.
