Resident Evil Emerges as the Year’s Standout Horror Reboot

You don’t need to have logged countless hours playing Resident Evil — or its many sequels, spin‑offs, first‑ or third‑person entries — to immediately sense that Zach Cregger’s addition to the video‑game‑turned‑multimedia‑franchise’s legacy feels distinct. Yes, the Weapons director’s movie jettisons a metastasizing mythology that has infected both the beloved PlayStation title and those lackluster big‑screen adaptations, turning what was once an industry‑changing survivalist horror shooter into just another intellectual property plagued by diminishing returns. Reboots happen, but merely restarting from scratch or discarding canon does not guarantee an upgrade. The series’ stewards tried this once before, and frankly, we’d rather forget it ever existed.

What makes this a fresh take on an old warhorse isn’t solely a back‑to‑basics approach—although it does embrace that: a lone protagonist travels from place to place, solving puzzles and slaughtering monsters. You might expect the film to pause and ask if you want to save your progress at key moments. Instead, Cregger goes beyond simply tossing the IP’s raw materials—its beloved heroes, wink‑and‑nod references—into a blockbuster blender and hitting puree. He asks: Why do these games work so well? What aspect of the gameplay has cemented their classic status? How can the thrills, the fun, the sensation of spending hours blasting the virtual damned and undead be translated into a horror film that works?

Saying Cregger cracked that cheat code would be an understatement. His Resident Evil is, hands down, one of the finest video‑game‑to‑film adaptations to date, yet it feels organic rather than a mere adaptation, avoids leaning on fan service or Easter‑egg hunts for homage, and never skimps on the gameplay dynamics that made the title endlessly replayable. The fate of our hapless hero—a courier played by Austin Abrams, who is absolutely stellar—charged with delivering a vital package between medical facilities, leads straight to the game’s infamous home base, Raccoon City. The Umbrella Corporation gets a name‑check, and we know the action will inevitably spill into a biohazard lab. Beyond that, the film aims higher: it seeks to fuse the dual sensations of playing a survival shooter and being immersed in an unpredictable genre picture. This is how you do it.

If anything, the filmmaker’s wild, gory redo owes as much to John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing as it does to the namesake series. At first everything feels routine, as Abrams’ “glorified Postmates” delivery guy encounters a woman in a snowy, desolate woods who appears slightly ill. His Good Samaritan instinct backfires. Soon, figures lurch from the shadows, biting with unsettling enthusiasm. Cregger paces action beats and jump scares deliberately; much like his 2022 surprise hit Barbarian and last year’s Weapons, this Resident Evil benefits from a masterful command of framing, a sleight‑of‑hand trick that makes the rug disappear beneath you, and a knack for using humor to both heighten and ease tension. His now‑signature horror storytelling style is as much a draw as the title itself, and he applies it here with gusto—and literal guts.

An encounter with a dog that is far more than it seems introduces truly unsettling, straight‑up Lovecraftian transformations. To put it bluntly: shooting, stabbing, or bludgeoning a creature doesn’t guarantee that whatever writhes inside can’t re‑assemble into a new hybrid form. If the urban‑legend notion of the “king rat” makes you queasy, you may want to skip this film altogether.

Potential allies and people to be saved appear and disappear—some will feel familiar, like Kali Reis from True Detective: Night Country as a classic Resident Evil commando, or Paul Walter Hauser from I, Tonya as a whiny, weaselly corporate exec—while others simply begin sprouting tentacles from their faces. Essentially, you follow Abrams as he moves from one mission‑like set piece to the next, occasionally hovering behind him as if he were an RPG avatar. Reach the creepy house in the middle of nowhere. Escape the creepy RV, whose interior carries the unmistakable sounds of a crying child. Navigate the creepy sewer tunnel teeming with zombie rats. Arrive at the creepy hospital’s 48th floor, where a lab might be able to craft a cure for the viral outbreak turning people into walking, running, jumping, chomping dead.

Most video games build toward a boss battle. This cinéma du gaming landmark offers its own brilliant twist on that trope, and, like the underage rampage that defined the climax of Cregger’s previous film, it employs a cartoonish momentum that keeps accelerating. The finale lands on such a high note that you begin to feel the equivalent of Sunday scares about a possible sequel—the fear that, like so many franchises before it, this new and vastly improved version will run itself into the ground and squander any goodwill. Hopefully, the lessons learned here will inform future projects and any continuations. For now, everyone involved in this superior sub‑genre entry deserves a victory lap; they’ve just delivered the year’s best horror reboot.

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