Our review: Cregger's Resident Evil drops the Umbrella lore for 95 minutes of a medical courier trying to get out of Raccoon City
Craving a lean, ultra-gory horror-action blast, you’ll find Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil delivers, with Austin Abrams turning in a star-making performance.
If you're expecting another trip through the maddening maze of Resident Evil lore, this new film isn't quite that. We've got Zach Cregger behind the camera this time, and he's taken a very different tack with the franchise: less exposition, more adrenaline, and not a single bored umbrella scientist in sight. The result is a horror-action romp that doesn't waste a second or stop for breath—and I daresay, it properly rattled the audience I sat with (a fair few in character cosplay, just to remind me how much I don't know about this series).
Resident Evil runs a tight ninety-five minutes—no filler, just pure action and gore front to back.
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Plot in Practice
The story kicks off with Austin Abrams as Bryan, a thoroughly unlucky medical courier. Before you can blink, he's landed with a mysterious package and a job to deliver it to Raccoon City—double pay, but nothing is ever that simple. His day already tanked after his girlfriend drops a pregnancy revelation, and things spiral sharply south from there: a strange woman lurches out of the woods, there's a grisly accident, and suddenly Bryan is knee-deep in a biomedical hellscape loaded with grotesque creatures and ramping stakes. No deep cuts from the franchise mythos, just pure survival horror from moment one.
Cregger keeps the pacing relentless, pinballing Bryan from one nightmare set-piece to another. Like an actual survival horror video game, our hero has to ration weapons, learn on the fly, and adapt as each encounter becomes nastier. It's never clear who or what might lurch out next, and the game-like urgency keeps things properly tense. Abrams is bloody good in the lead: he's not a superhero, not useless, just in way over his head—funny where it counts, genuinely likeable, and surprisingly earnest for a bloodbath like this.
Style and Substance
On the technical front, it's gorgeous stuff. The cinematography comes courtesy of Dariusz Wolski (yes, Ridley Scott's favourite), giving us everything from grimy corridors to blood-slicked nurseries in clinical, confident style. The score tips its hat to Carpenter and even finds room for a nod to Eyes Wide Shut, which is a flex. If you're after hard-hitting action, you've hit the jackpot: elevator-shaft brawls, chaotic nursery set pieces, and a no-nonsense approach to carnage all crank the R rating to its limits.
- The running time is an ultra-lean 95 minutes—Cregger doesn't hang about.
One pleasant surprise: this isn't just gore for its own sake. There's a heartbeat here. You genuinely want to see Bryan survive, with his very normal bloke energy and quick learning giving the whole mess some real stakes. Abrams is a proper standout, switching gears between comic timing and frazzled terror, almost channelling a modern Bruce Campbell with better hair.
Much as I've enjoyed Cregger's last outings (Barbarian was equal parts brilliant and baffling, if you ask me), this feels like him graduating to the big leagues. There's clear purpose behind the madness. It all barrels along without tripping over its own feet, and with the trailers keeping the nastiest bits under wraps, most of the best moments remain unspoiled going in.
If you're after a Resident Evil film stuffed to the rafters with backstory, this isn't it. But if what you want is a bracing, quickfire horror-action blast—this one's hard to fault.