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Resident Evil (2026) Reboot Film Review: Zach Cregger's Rollercoaster Zombie Survival Ride With a Wicked Comedic Streak in IMAX
I'll say this upfront: I'm not the target audience for a Resident Evil movie. I've never touched the games, and I went in braced for another over-inflated instalment of a franchise that had long since run out of new ideas. What changed my mind was the name in the director's chair. After Weapons and Barbarian, Zach Cregger had already proven he could build dread out of almost nothing; the question was whether that same instinct could survive contact with a billion-dollar video game IP. It does. More than that, it thrives. And critics are even calling it the best-ever adaptation of a video game, not just of the Resident Evil franchise.
Cregger's version strips the franchise back to zero. No Alice, no Chris Redfield, no Jill Valentine — the established cast is gone, replaced by an entirely original story built around Bryan (Austin Abrams), an ordinary medical courier handed one last priority delivery on a dark, snowy night. What should be a routine drop-off unravels into a night-long fight for survival against zombies and bio-engineered horrors. By Cregger's own admission, the decision to jettison the games' familiar faces has not gone down well with every corner of the fandom. Coming at it with no allegiance to the source material, though, that clean slate is precisely what makes the film breathe.
What's most striking is how much the film commits to that checkpoint-to-checkpoint momentum you'd actually expect from a video game adaptation — Cregger moves Bryan from one crisis straight into the next, rarely letting the pressure fully release before the next obstacle appears. That relentlessness is where the comedy earns its keep, doing far more structural work here than genre pictures usually allow it to. The film never undercuts its own tension with a joke — instead, the humour arrives right at the point where the dread would otherwise become unbearable, and lets the pressure valve off just enough to reset for the next scare. It's a difficult balance to strike, and Cregger nails the timing of it almost every time.
Austin Abrams is the engine that makes the approach work. He plays Bryan's terror and exasperation with a deceptively light touch — never mugging for the camera, never leaning into irony at the material's expense — which is exactly why the film's more outlandish beats still land as frightening rather than campy.
I mean that "on the edge of my seat" in the most literal sense. There's a genuine high-intensity, what-would-I-do quality to the way Cregger stages Bryan's panic — the film puts you inside his fumbling, adrenaline-shot decision-making rather than just watching it from a safe distance. There's a moment where he's trying to load a gun with hands that clearly won't cooperate, and it's played with just enough clumsy realism that you feel your own pulse spike with his. And then there are the padlocks. So many padlocks, always exactly where you don't want them, always eating up precious seconds while something is closing in.
That escalating, scene-to-scene momentum is where the film's video-game bones show through most clearly — not in any single shot or angle, but in the structure itself. It plays like a level-by-level rollercoaster, each new location and set piece raising the stakes just as the last one resolves, never quite letting you catch your breath before the next objective appears. And Bryan always has a clear, legible goal driving him forward, which matters more than it sounds like it should: it's the thing that keeps you rooting for him scene after scene, rather than just watching a string of gnarly set pieces happen to a stranger. Combine that clarity of mission with line deliveries pitched exactly right for the chaos around them, and the panic never tips into incoherence — you're rattled, but you're never lost.
Visually, there's a genuine cleverness to how Cregger frames the action — several shots pull directly from the language of the games without ever tipping into pastiche, angles and blocking that feel game-informed rather than game-imitative. Shooting the whole thing on IMAX cameras was the right call: seeing it on that scale, the set pieces get room to actually land, and the format earns its keep. There's also a body-horror streak running through the back half that owes a clear debt to something like The Substance.
I'll admit a bias here: I am genuinely, embarrassingly frightened of zombie films as a rule, and this is the rare entry in the genre I'd call more fun than frightening — which, for me, is a compliment, not a knock. The scares are real, but they're staged with enough wit that they never tip into the kind of dread that sends me out of the cinema. That's a difficult tone to hold for 90 minutes, and Cregger holds it — and crucially, he knows exactly when to stop. The film gets in, puts you through the wringer, and gets out before the conceit wears thin; there's no bloat, no third act that overstays its welcome. It's totally self-aware about what kind of ride it's offering, and disciplined enough not to push past the point where that ride is fun.
The Verdict
This is a reboot that justifies its own existence, which is rarer than it should be. It's self-aware without curdling into smugness, funny without losing its nerve as horror, and confident enough in its own new mythology that you don't necessarily miss the old one. The wider critical reaction has been in the same key: The Hollywood Reporter, the Globe and Mail and Deadline have all published enthusiastic reviews since release, with Deadline crediting Cregger with fully reviving a franchise that had "clearly run its course" into something "hugely entertaining," per Deadline. If you can see it in IMAX, do — it puts survival horror into a whole new light.
Resident Evil is now in Hong Kong cinemas. Watch it at iSquare in IMAX.
Disclaimer: The writer was invited to the premiere screening by Sony Hong Kong. All observations, assessments, and opinions expressed are based on the writer’s independent experience and professional judgement.
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