“Resident Evil” Is Fun, but Soulless. What Else Could It Be?

It would be hard to overstate the influence of Resident Evil. The franchise, one of the most successful ever, spans thirty-odd games—many of which are very good—and has spawned multiple live-action film adaptations and television shows, nearly all of which have been terrible. The games, which follow the survivors of a zombie outbreak induced by a corporate bioweapon, popularized a genre known as survival horror, in which a normie character—as opposed to the typical overpowered hero—must carefully navigate a dangerous environment, conserving ammo and other resources, solving puzzles, and evading enemies almost as often as fighting them. (One can imagine how this would appeal to a certain kind of personality.) These games, alongside their first film adaptation, in 2002, helped revive the zombie-film genre, which had peaked in 1978 with George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead,” before dying out in the late nineteen-eighties, as audiences moved on to smarter monsters: vampires, serial killers, Chucky.

Today, the Resident Evil franchise holds the record for the most live-action films based on a video-game series. The movies occupy a strange cultural position, though, making up a commercially successful franchise with basically zero critical acclaim. Salon described the first installment as “mildly grisly, assaultively noisy and tremendously boring”; Roger Ebert put the film and its sequel, “Resident Evil: Apocalypse,” on his most-hated-films list. The movies have been most controversial among fans of the games because of their distance from the original source material. (It certainly didn’t help that the writer and director, Paul W. S. Anderson, created a new protagonist for his films, an ass-kicking yet spiritually empty heroine named Alice—played by Milla Jovovich, his wife.) Hollywood has long puzzled over the problem of video-game adaptations: change the plot too much and alienate the fans; hew too closely to the game and alienate the masses. Either way, these adaptations—even the well-respected ones, such as “The Last of Us,” on HBO, or “Fallout,” on Prime Video—necessarily lack the thing that makes a video game enjoyable: the experience of playing it.

This is why Zach Cregger’s new “Resident Evil” movie, which premièred last week, is an undeniable feat. The film is a loving homage to the sensation of playing a survival-horror game. We shift environments every few minutes, with the set pieces becoming increasingly elaborate, and the enemies increasingly deadly—mirroring the experience of moving from one level to the next. The movie opens on a young, schlubby guy named Bryan, brilliantly embodied by the actor Austin Abrams, who played a drug addict in Cregger’s previous film, “Weapons.” Bryan has a very wholesome job: delivering organs to hospitals where they’ll be used for transplants. And yet we can also tell, as he shuffles haplessly through a crowded hospital, looking like an extra in his own life, that he is not a great guy, but a disappointingly ordinary one. He is what’s known in the video-game world as an N.P.C., or a non-player character. Here, though, he’s also our hero, which means that after he’s commissioned to deliver a crucial package to another hospital—he thinks that it’s an organ, but he later discovers that it’s something scientists need in order to make an antidote for the virus they’ve accidentally unleashed—we get to watch him struggle his way through a monster-ridden wasteland that he has no business being in. Among the zombies he encounters, the mutations range: one creature’s face splits open like a flower, revealing an enormous eye and far too many teeth; another is a morbidly obese sewer dweller. More frequently than not, tentacles are involved. It’s solid body horror, but the film’s minor touches are what make it shine as an adaptation. While exploring a seemingly deserted farmhouse, Bryan finds a shotgun in one room, then must search the rest of the house for the shells, an experience familiar to anyone who’s ever played a Resident Evil game. He constantly fires at padlocks trying to open them, not realizing that he’s going to need to find a key somewhere.

Cregger’s film is on track to become the most profitable movie in the entire “Resident Evil” series, grossing sixty million dollars domestically in its opening weekend. GQ and Esquire have declared it the best video-game adaptation ever, and it probably is. But, in the context of Cregger’s œuvre, this thrilling, well-crafted film still feels slightly disappointing, which is less a knock on the movie than it is a recognition of how we engage with auteurs.

I went to see “Resident Evil” because I’m a Zach Cregger fan, and I enjoyed it less than I otherwise would have because I’m a Zach Cregger fan. The director is one of the most exciting filmmakers today, known for his structurally and tonally audacious—and also genuinely fear-inducing and hilarious—movies. He is operating at a level matched only by Jordan Peele and Ari Aster. His 2022 film, “Barbarian,” has one the cleverest setups of any horror movie I’ve seen: A woman arrives at a house rental in the middle of the night only to discover that a strange man is already staying there. They must have been double-booked; does she want to come inside so they can figure out what to do? Cregger had said that he was inspired by “The Gift of Fear,” a 1997 self-help guide by the security expert Gavin de Becker, which encourages women to trust their subconscious and to pay attention to subtle red flags in their interactions with men. (The movie began as a creative exercise, in which Cregger set out to write a scene that included as many of these red flags as possible—ones that women would notice but men would miss.) As the movie continues, we switch between different characters’ perspectives, and move back and forth in time. The film is uneven, but also relentlessly innovative.

“Weapons,” released in 2025, was both much more ambitious and far more disciplined. It follows a suburban town in the aftermath of a tragedy: seventeen children, all from the same class, vanish from their homes on the same night, sparking a community-wide witch hunt initially aimed at the children’s teacher. (The real witch responsible, played by Amy Madigan, won an Oscar for her performance.) “Weapons” has been widely interpreted as an allegory for mass shootings. There’s the title, of course, and then the concept of an entire classroom disappearing at once. The seventeen children—the same number of kids and adults who were murdered in the Parkland shooting—disappear at 2:17 A.M., which viewers speculated might be a reference to the number of members of the House of Representatives who voted, in 2022, for a ban on assault weapons that never became law. At one point, a grieving father, played by Josh Brolin, dreams of an assault weapon floating over a neighbor’s house: an AR imprinted with 2:17. Cregger has denied that the movie is about shootings, saying that he was mostly interested in exploring how alcoholism can destroy a family. But what about the dream? “I don’t know,” Cregger said, when an interviewer asked him what it meant. “It’s a very important moment for me in this movie, and to be frank with you, I think what I love about it so much is that I don’t understand it.”

I believe that “Weapons” is about guns, regardless of whether that was Cregger’s initial intention. But I don’t blame him for not actively embracing that interpretation, seeing how it might get in the way of, say, rebooting a video-game franchise with guns. One of the running gags in “Resident Evil” is Bryan’s ineptitude with firearms. “I’ve only used guns in video games. It’s confusing in real life,” he says, before accidentally firing off an MP-5 submachine gun inside a car. Just as a player grows in proficiency as she makes her way through a game, Bryan’s narrative arc largely consists of him becoming a more competent marksman.

In one of the film’s most memorable scenes, Bryan, newly armed with a shotgun, ventures into an R.V., where he encounters a young girl. She’s beginning to mutate; one of her legs has sprouted tentacles. He tries to save her, but she turns hostile, at which point, he blows her head off. The scene offers a double shock: it’s rare to see a child killed in a horror movie (notably, in “Weapons,” none of the children died), and it’s rarer yet for a child to be killed by the protagonist. Even Bryan doesn’t believe it. “I didn’t just shoot a little girl in the face,” he tells himself. “I like kids.” The sequence is one of the more disturbing—and, yes, funny—set pieces in the movie, and it felt deliberate, as if Cregger were taking aim, so to speak, at the discourse around his previous work. I didn’t read the scene as a disavowal so much as a pointed reminder that “Resident Evil,” unlike “Barbarian” and “Weapons,” isn’t that interested in mining the psychological depths of its characters. What Cregger has created here is a ninety-five-minute romp, a reboot that’s meant to be considered alongside a different canon than his own.

The main thing we know about Bryan, aside from the fact that he’s a “glorified Postmates driver,” in his words, is that his girlfriend is pregnant; the film begins with him learning this over the phone, and failing to meet the moment. In what’s meant to be “Resident Evil” ’s emotional climax, Bryan, increasingly worried that he’s not going to make it back home, sits in a parking garage and records a voice memo for her: “I hate that my first reaction was just me being afraid of change or growing up,” he says. Yet, almost as soon as Bryan begins to cry, he’s interrupted by a scientist addressing him through the parking-garage intercom: “Yeah, you, crying guy.” It’s the voice of Cregger himself, who, in an audio-only cameo, gives Bryan directions to a lab, on the twenty-eighth floor of the building, where scientists are working on the cure to the unleashed virus.

I later realized that the voice-memo scene captures, rather shrewdly, a common feature of video games, in which players stumble upon recordings from the poor N.P.C.s who died making the same journey before them. But, as a stand-alone scene, Bryan’s tearful goodbye message feels rote—which perhaps Cregger knows, hence why he quickly interjects so that we can return to the action. Another movie, an emotionally rich one, the kind that we know Cregger can make, would have lingered on the moment. Bryan is an N.P.C., though, and so maybe Cregger is doing us a favor by preventing us from getting too attached. The true emotional climax of “Resident Evil” comes several minutes later, when Bryan, staring down two enemy threats at once, takes a deep breath, aims his handgun—which has a single bullet left—and finally gets off a good shot. “Yeah!” he shouts. “Video games!” ♦