Resident Evil (2026) (Mark Kermode’s film review).

Here’s ace film reviewer Mark Kermode’s review of Resident Evil, for those who prefer their criticism delivered with more hand gestures that us here at the Nest:

If the embed above has been quietly disposed of by Umbrella’s legal department, the video lives here: https://youtu.be/8r6c35jzxNs

And what did the team at SFcrowsnest think of it? Read on, McDuff. There is a particular kind of cinematic institution that keeps going purely through stubbornness, and for twenty-four years the ‘Resident Evil’ film franchise has been exactly that. Six films of Milla Jovovich doing slow-motion kung fu at computer-generated dogs, one 2021 reboot that nobody has thought about since, one Netflix series cancelled so fast the cast may still be waiting for their second-season scripts. Along the way it became the highest-grossing video game adaptation on the planet, which tells you rather more about the planet than it does about the films.

So the good news is that Zach Cregger has turned up and made a film that is not merely tolerable but actively, obnoxiously enjoyable. The bad news, if you are the sort of person who enjoys a grudge, is that you will now have to find something else to be rude about at conventions.

Cregger, who gave us ‘Barbarian’ and ‘Weapons’, has spotted the thing that every previous adaptation missed. The ‘Resident Evil’ games are not about heroes. They are about a frightened person with the wrong equipment in a building that hates them, counting their bullets and making increasingly poor decisions about which door to open. Accordingly, our protagonist is Bryan (Austin Abrams), a medical courier who describes himself, accurately, as a glorified takeaway driver with a cold box. He takes a last-minute overnight job up an icy mountain road towards Raccoon City, largely because his girlfriend has just taken a pregnancy test and he would rather drive into a snowstorm than have the conversation. Reader, the snowstorm turns out to be the safer option by a considerable margin.

What follows runs roughly ninety minutes, moves like a shopping trolley down a fire escape, and has the decency to end before it starts explaining its own mythology. Abrams is superb, which is to say he is pathetic in all the right ways. He cannot shoot. He does not know how to reload. He screams at a pitch that would embarrass a kettle. When the film hands him a weapon, it is less an empowerment moment than a health-and-safety incident waiting to happen, and the comedy that comes out of it is the purest Sam Raimi tribute act since Bruce Campbell last argued with his own hand.

The supporting cast is largely there to demonstrate that Umbrella Corporation has an HR problem. Zach Cherry and Paul Walter Hauser play company scientists with the weary air of men who have filled in an awful lot of incident reports, and Kali Reis is the corporate enforcer sent to tidy up a situation that has passed well beyond tidying. Cregger kills recognisable faces with a cheerfulness that keeps the whole thing genuinely tense, because you rapidly stop assuming anyone has plot armour.

The creature work is the other reason to buy a ticket. Somebody in this production clearly sat everyone down and made them watch ‘The Thing’ until they agreed that latex, slime and a man in a suit will always beat a rendering farm. The mutations have weight. They have moisture. They make noises that will put you off ham. There is a wet, tactile nastiness here that modern horror has largely outsourced to a laptop, and its return is enormously welcome, even if it does rather ruin the popcorn.

Is it deep? Not remotely. ‘Barbarian’ had things to say about men and property and who gets believed. This one has things to say about the difficulty of operating a shotgun while crying. Cregger reportedly trimmed a few gags after early screenings because audiences were laughing too much, and you can see the seams where the horror has been asked to reassert itself, which is a criticism roughly equivalent to complaining that a bouncy castle is too bouncy.

The finale throws in absolutely everything, including several things you would have sworn the budget could not accommodate, and then stops abruptly, leaving the door open for a sequel in the manner of a man leaving a party without saying goodbye. On this evidence, we would quite like the sequel, which is not a sentence this magazine has ever expected to type about a ‘Resident Evil’ film.

(Resident Evil, 2026. Directed by Zach Cregger. Written by Zach Cregger and Shay Hatten. Starring Austin Abrams, Zach Cherry, Kali Reis and Paul Walter Hauser. Running time: 90 minutes approx. Distributed by Sony Pictures. Released 18 September 2026.)