Resident Evil (2026)

Paying to be frightened is a strange hobby when you stop and think about it, and psychologists even have a name for the appeal: benign masochism, the enjoyment of a negative feeling like fear when your brain knows you’re actually safe. Resident Evil (2026) is a great argument for the theory. I was stressed for basically the entire movie, and I still walked out grinning, because the jump scares landed hard in a theater full of people who all flinched at the same moment. That shared jolt followed by nervous laughter is a big part of why horror plays so differently in a crowd than it does alone on a couch, and Resident Evil is built for the crowd version.

What Is Resident Evil (2026) About?

Zach Cregger, the director behind Barbarian and Weapons, co-wrote the script with Shay Hatten, and the story follows Bryan, a medical courier who takes a double-pay delivery to a hospital in Raccoon City and ends up in the middle of an outbreak. Bryan is not a cop, a soldier, or anyone with useful training. He’s just an ordinary guy having a terrible night, and that choice is a big reason the movie is so stressful, since a competent protagonist lets the audience relax a little while Bryan makes decisions the way most of us would, which leaves you unsure he’ll make it out. The movie also stands apart from the earlier Resident Evil films, so there’s no homework required before you buy a ticket. If you liked what Cregger did with dread in Barbarian and Weapons, you already know he’s good at making an ordinary stretch of screen time feel dangerous, and he brings that instinct to a much bigger production here.

Austin Abrams Carries Resident Evil

A huge portion of Resident Evil rests on Austin Abrams alone, and he handles it impressively. Solo stretches are hard because there is nobody to bounce a reaction off, so the audience has to believe the fear entirely from one face and one body. Abrams, who also appeared in Weapons, makes Bryan’s panic feel believable without tipping into caricature, and I stayed invested in whether he’d survive even when the movie gave him no one to talk to. From a psychology standpoint, that isolation is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Isolation amplifies fear because there is nobody to check your read of a situation against, so watching one person face all of this without a partner to reassure him makes every unfamiliar sound feel more serious than it would in a group.

The supporting cast is a blast for the same reason, because their appearances break up Bryan’s night in a way that feels like a change of pace for both him and the audience. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser all turn up along the way, and their fun, recognizable faces give Resident Evil some variety without pulling attention away from Bryan’s story.

How Well Does Resident Evil Work as a Video Game Adaptation?

Video game movies have a rough track record, mostly because they tend to copy the surface of a game, with the names and the monsters and the logos, while missing what it feels like to play. Cregger has said he wanted to capture the feeling of limited ammo and a boss that keeps following you, both staples of the games, and that’s the best thing about Resident Evil as an adaptation. Instead of stuffing the movie with references, he reproduces the experience of playing, and it makes the film feel like a Resident Evil game in a way that a checklist of Easter eggs never could.

The limited ammo idea is smart because scarcity changes how people think. When resources run low, attention narrows onto the problem in front of you and every choice starts to carry weight, so I found myself counting along with Bryan and dreading each decision about what was worth spending. The pursuing threat adds the other half of the game feeling. Something you can’t shake keeps your body on alert, because there is never a clear moment where the danger has ended, and uncertainty about when it will show up again is usually harder on the nerves than the confrontation itself. Combine the two and you get most of the reason I was so stressed, and also most of the reason the jump scares were so fun once they finally came, since the release of tension after a scare is what turns fear into enjoyment.

The runtime helps too. Resident Evil clocks in at about an hour and a half, which leaves very little room to recover between bursts of tension, and I never got the chance to settle in and relax. Depending on how you feel about being on edge for that long, that’s either a selling point or a warning, and for me it was firmly the first one.

Who Should Watch Resident Evil?

I loved this one, and I’d tell most horror fans to see it in a theater rather than waiting for streaming, since the crowd reaction is part of the experience. It’s a strong pick for anyone who enjoyed Barbarian or Weapons, for people who like jump-scare horror with a crowd, and for fans of the games who want a movie that captures how playing feels rather than one that recites the lore. It’s rated R and it is relentlessly tense, so if you don’t enjoy being stressed out by a movie, this is not the one to change your mind. Everyone else should buy the ticket and bring someone to grab.