'Resident Evil': Adapting the Game, Not Just the Name
As is increasingly the M.O. of Hollywood, another major studio has scooped up an indie filmmaker with a distinct voice and placed them behind the wheel of existing IP.
Zach Cregger arrived on the horror scene in 2022 with Barbarian, a film that quickly established him as one of the genre’s most distinct contemporary voices. He clearly riffs on Wes Craven’s The People Under the Stairs (1991), while channeling the weirdo instincts of a creature feature. The film announced Cregger as a filmmaker with a way of twisting familiar tropes into something fresh and unpredictable.
He followed that up with Weapons (2025), whose exploitative creepiness even managed to attract the attention of the traditionally horror-wary Academy in the form of Amy Madigan’s Best Supporting Actress win. In his sophomore outing, Cregger seemed less interested in making an exploitation film than in exploring the machinery of the artistic impulse: its images, rhythms and anxieties. After two legitimately oddball witch-possession exercises – the latter of which doubled as a school shooting allegory – how far could the boundaries be pushed?
When it came time for the directing announcement for another reboot of the ever-evolving Resident Evil saga, the big question was whether anyone could find the right balance between action and scares in adapting these beloved video games for the big screen. There is the nasty schlock of the early-to-mid 2000s, as well as the genuine sincerity from all six of Paul W.S. Anderson’s movies, a handful of which I consider to be rather brilliant in their emotional charge.
However, the latest entries seem to lean into the world-building style of the Wachowskis, and by consequence undermine any real sense of existential dread or vulnerable character work. More importantly, those films rarely captured the survival-horror rhythm – the constant scavenging for bullets and herbs, and the uncertainty of whether what you’re carrying will be enough to get you through the next encounter – that makes the source material so addictive in the first place. That feeling is intrinsic to Resident Evil: even the most mundane item can become a lifeline, and survival often comes down to knowing when to fight, when to run, and when to conserve what little you have. The hyper stylized, nu-metal tone that Anderson never quite shook from the 1990s films always felt at odds with what makes the games so effective.
Of all the properties Cregger could have been handed, I think that Resident Evil is the best fit for him. Because if there’s one thing Cregger’s films have consistently demonstrated, it’s an understanding of the pleasures of the horror genre — the grotesque, the absurd, the suspenseful, the pulpy and, occasionally, the ridiculous — along with a measure of earnestness. Those qualities make the newest entry feel less like another instance of Hollywood hiring a hot horror director to resurrect a brand, and more like an indie filmmaker’s opportunity to dig deep inside a world that was conceived from those very ingredients. The result is an adaptation that captures the experience of playing the games rather than simply retelling them.
The feeling of viewer-narrator mutuality is what Cregger seems to understand the most, and is something that he has shown appreciation for during press interviews and post-screening Q&As. There’s a rhythm of desperation that is reiterated throughout this new adaptation, whether that be in protagonist Bryan’s (Austin Abrams) scouring of a room from top to bottom for a handful of ammunition – only to immediately waste half of it trying to shoot a padlock off – or simply being a terrible shot when the pressure starts to mount. It’s funny in the moment, but it also captures something fundamental about the games that is undoubtedly difficult to translate.
Cregger understands that the frustration is part of the fun, and that sometimes the most exciting thing you can do in a survival horror game is spend several minutes searching through drawers and cupboards for anything useful, knowing full well that whatever you find probably won’t be enough. It’s also where the film’s use of first-person POV shots becomes particularly effective, briefly putting us behind Bryan’s eyes and turning the audience into the player while he fumbling around in the dark or tries to line up a shot. This feels particularly appropriate for Resident Evil the game, a series that has continually shifted its relationship with perspective, having evolved from the fixed third-person camera angles of the originals to over-the-shoulder perspectives in the later entries, and finally into the fully immersive first-person viewpoints of Resident Evil Biohazard (2017) and Resident Evil Village (2021).
Cregger effectively bridges those different visual languages within the film, using conventional third-person coverage to establish the physical space before suddenly dropping us into Bryan’s vision when the experience needs to become more immediate, disorientating and player-like. Rather than simply functioning as stylistic flourish, these moments replicate that distinctly interactive feeling of being trapped inside the character’s perspective, forced to make split-second decisions with limited resources and absolutely no guarantee that what’s waiting around the corner won’t completely screw you.
Most interesting yet is how the filmmaker dials in on translating the post-simulation brain chemistry of playing these games over many years. The result is a tight 90-minute sequence of interconnected set pieces that feel less like a conventional three-act horror movie and more like a string of increasingly fucked-up levels, each one feeding directly into the next before inevitably building towards a boss battle.
This takes me to Austin Abrams, a young actor Cregger first directed as a pathetic, twitchy drifter in Weapons. Here, he plays a hapless medical coua severe situation with an entire town drifting into hell. This kind of protagonist is a refreshing departure from the duty-driven government agents Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine or the sarcastic cop Leon Kennedy, or the purely logistical, emotionally detached super-spy Ada Wong from previous titles. Resident Evil has always had a smorgasbord of different character archetypes to pull from, so it’s refreshing to see Cregger put an original character into this pre-existing world, particularly one who spends the majority of the film looking petrified and confused; he is constantly screaming his head off.
A lot of this performance reminded me of Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky from the Transformers movies, and I mean that as a compliment. There’s a similar sense of an ordinary, slightly neurotic guy being dropped into an absurd situation, desperately trying to keep up with the circumstances while possessing absolutely none of the confidence or composure of the people surrounding him.
Abrams commits to that physical comedy and sheer panic beautifully, but never lets Bryan become an outright cartoon, which makes his eventual attempts at survival all the more enjoyable. He feels less like a traditional action hero and more like the kind of person who would realistically be horrified to discover that the world of Resident Evil actually exists, which renders his perspective rather grounding.
Admittedly, there is some digital sheen to the creature VFX work that threatens to distract. But other than that, Cregger is three for three in dropping high art pretense and executing tightly-plotted horror. He may not aspire to make Resident Evil into some grand statement about the human condition or elevate the material beyond what it fundamentally is, but he masters the monsters, the guns, the corridors, the puzzle and the sheer joy of watching one battle after another.
I doubt there is a future where Cregger makes another Resident Evil movie. The film feels like a set of sequences he’s had in the bank for a while and needed to get out of his system before moving on to the next product. Kudos to Cregger – he is one of the few driving the herders into the theaters to gather around and watch glossy exploitation movies. And perhaps more importantly, he’s doing it in a way that makes that tradition accessible to a mainstream audience who wouldn’t otherwise seek it out.
Cregger uses the language of exploitation to take franchise fans along for a ride. Films like Barbarian, Weapons and now Resident Evil aren’t simply exercises in studio horror; they’re widening the horizons of people who may not realize that the strange, pulpy movies they’re watching have an entire cinematic lineage behind them. If a glossy Resident Evil movie gets someone to eventually go digging through the more unhinged side of exploitation cinema, then Cregger has already done something worthwhile. For being gifted a giant studio property, he is a shrewd man for choosing to utilize it as his own creative sandbox. And what a final shot!
– Jack
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