Resident Evil Review: Zach Cregger's Reboot Finally Gets the Franchise Right

Brisbane got there first. The night before Resident Evil opened across the US, a strong local turnout filed into a V-MAX screen at Event Cinemas City for the local preview — and the reaction in the room by the credits was the kind a franchise this battered rarely gets anymore.

It's worth remembering how battered. Between 2002 and 2016, Milla Jovovich — a genuine supermodel before she was an action star, once the highest-paid model in the world — carried Alice through six Resident Evil films, a run that made money but drifted further from Capcom's original games with each instalment. A 2021 reset, Welcome to Raccoon City, tried to correct course by hewing closer to the games and landed with a thud instead: a 30% critics' score, a $42 million gross against a $25 million budget, and a planned sequel that never happened.

This new Resident Evil is a different animal, written and directed by Zach Cregger — the filmmaker behind Barbarian and this year's Weapons — and built as an original story rather than another retelling. Austin Abrams leads as Bryan, a medical courier dragged into one catastrophic night in Raccoon City, alongside Zach Cherry (Severance, Fallout) as a scientist, former world champion boxer turned True Detective: Night Country breakout Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser, still riding the strength of his Black Bird performance.

Cregger has said he wanted to build something that could exist "on the edges" of the games rather than adapt one directly — "I've played it again and again," he says in the film's production notes. "I'm celebrating everything I love about them." That shows. The film borrows the games' own visual language — disorienting, video-game-style camera movement used to build dread rather than confusion, with genuine first-person POV dropped in sparingly enough that it still lands as a jolt rather than a gimmick. Cregger has called it "a rock-'em/sock-'em experience" propelling Bryan "deeper and deeper into the depths of Hell" — a real-time, "Go! Go! Go!" sprint rather than a film that stops to explain itself.

That pace is the film's biggest departure from the noughties Jovovich era. There's no extended table-setting before things go wrong — Bryan's world collapses almost immediately, and what backstory exists is fed through in fragments as the night goes on, rather than front-loaded. It's a structure that trusts the audience to keep up, and it makes the character feel earned rather than explained.

The horror itself doesn't skimp, either — genuine scares and gore sit alongside a vein of dry, quick humour that never undercuts the tension, giving Bryan a wit that reads as authentically of-the-moment rather than a screenwriter's idea of it. It's a difficult balance many horror films get wrong in one direction or the other, and this one holds it.

For a franchise that's spent two decades drifting from the thing that made it popular in the first place, this is the rare adaptation that finally closes that gap — faithful to the games without being handcuffed to their plots, and genuinely frightening without losing its sense of fun. Resident Evil is in cinemas now.