Resident Evil (2026) No Spoiler Review: I Never Played the Game or Saw the Other Movies, and This One Is Definitely Not Forgettable

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If I could describe Resident Evil (2026) in three words, they would be fun, unique, and well-made.

Zach Cregger, the director behind Barbarian (2022) and Weapons (2025), takes on the Resident Evil video game.

My wife, who actually played the games, was more ecstatic than I was in our post-film debrief. She said it captured so much of what it was like to play the game, from the perspective of the actual gamer rather than the game character. She loved that the protagonist was just an ordinary guy and not a buff action hero. He didn’t know how to “play the game” and made all the mistakes a newbie player would make.

I never played the game and don’t know absolutely anything about it, but I still found this a good watch. Above average, definitely. I also never actually saw any of the previous Resident Evil movies. Or maybe I did, but they were just forgettable. Well, this film is definitely not forgettable.

I thought the monsters were original. They were refreshing, if you could call monsters that. But I definitely saw a lot of things I had never seen before, or at least never seen presented in a fresh new way. My wife said the multi-limbed creatures were not in the game, but they were really interesting. While watching, I hesitated to call it a zombie movie, though technically I think it is, because the monsters were so original. Because of this, Cregger elevates his film to more than just another zombie movie.

There were a lot of times while watching when I felt like someone was playing the game beside me. There were first-person POV shots, but they were used sparingly and really well done.

I think the casting was great. Austin Abrams was great. I totally didn’t spot that he played the junkie in Weapons. The previews showed a movie called Whalefall, which was really weird, but he also stars in it. It was fun to see Paul Walter Hauser do what he does, as well as Zach Cherry (from Severance, 2022).

My wife also said it’s so funny that the main character goes through all of this shit just because he wanted to escape the responsibilities in his real life. Not so much a spoiler, but if he had only gone home to have a tough conversation with his girlfriend, he would have had a totally different night.

I’m tempted to say it’s three for three for Cregger, though I would rank this third of the three. And the timing between this release and Weapons is so close that I don’t think this is his “money” movie, where studios give him a big enough budget to do whatever he wants. A lot of up-and-coming directors fall for that trap, most notably Ari Aster with back-to-back Beau Is Afraid (2023) and Eddington (2025). So I’m eagerly awaiting what Cregger does next.

Let’s go back to the theaters, people! This is a fun watch in the theater.

I was kind of sad that there weren’t many people in the cinema this week. And for some reason, our 1:30 p.m. Sunday screening had a lot of senior citizens. It was weird.

★★★★☆ for both of us.

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