Resident Evil (2026) works beautifully as a gateway. I should say upfront that I don’t like horror, and I’ve never played the games. I tagged along on a whim with a friend who’s a fan, and since everything I knew about the franchise came from posters, I sat in that freezing theatre expecting a woman with a gun, a braid, and a chip on her shoulder.
Zach Cregger gave me a medical courier named Bryan instead.
I regretted saying yes within five minutes. Then the film made me laugh. It does comedy without fuss, force, or cringe, and it gives you just enough breathing room to ground yourself before it yanks you back under. It doesn’t drown you in exposition either; you get enough to understand the stakes, then you’re thrown into the chaos. I spent every quiet stretch braced for a jumpscare, and my heart survived. I was promised guts, and that contract was honoured without ever feeling cheap.
When the film gave me a penanggal on crack, which then frankensteined, I was floored. The effects are practical, textured, and plentiful. Every so often I’d nudge my friend (“Is this from the game?”) and they’d nod, happy. They loved the game, and they were satisfied with the adaptation, which felt like the verdict that counted.
Austin Abrams makes Bryan relatable without making him stupid, which is rarer than it should be in horror. The genre loves to punish characters for splitting up or touching the obviously cursed artefact. Bryan makes questionable decisions, but they’re the kind any of us might make with our brain short-circuiting from terror. He has a heart, and I’m not talking about what’s in the medical bag. Somewhere along the way I forgot I was watching a story. Bryan stopped being a protagonist and became a guy I’d met somewhere, somehow, having the worst night of his life.
That’s the film’s real trick. This is the backstory of the random dead NPC you find in every prologue, the body slumped against a wall with a final message scrawled in blood. Resident Evil is that note, expanded. It’s a cautionary tale about the dangers of having a job, and about saying yes to a double shift because the money was good.
Rogue One pulled the same move with Star Wars. Zooming in on a minor character often expands a world far better than retreading core lore, and you see Raccoon City clearer from the margins. Most of us don’t picture ourselves as the chosen one. Deep down we identify with the bystanders caught in the crossfire, and Bryan is us, dropped in with a pistol and no choice but to keep going. The camera stays close because he doesn’t know what’s around the corner. You experience the night alongside him, never ahead of him.
The monsters go from 0 to 100 at breakneck speed, but I can’t tell you how faithfully the mutation timeline tracks with game lore. There’s a method to the madness, though. Every creature’s evolution mirrors and amplifies Bryan’s core fears, planted in the film’s opening minutes. That design choice is why it works so well as a standalone story.
Some of it feels lifted straight from a video game, and I mean that as praise. The way Bryan moves, the way the camera follows, the way certain scenes unfold: you can feel the controller in your hands even when you’re not holding one. It never plays as a gimmick. An audience surrogate only works if we believe we’d react the same way, and the film builds that belief shot by shot.
The pacing is relentless, one damn thing after another, and so tight that the thin secondary characters barely matter. This is Bryan’s night. The supporting cast exists to serve his journey, and in a film this lean that feels intentional rather than careless. Cregger knows what he’s doing.
I walked out wanting to grab a controller, which I never expected to say about a horror franchise. My friend walked out already planning a replay. Somewhere in there, the gateway worked.
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