Survival Horror Done Right: Why Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil Delivers the Goods
Walking out into the lobby after the credits rolled on the new Resident Evil, you could immediately feel the buzz in the air. There was this shared sigh of relief and excitement. People weren't nitpicking or groaning; they were genuinely energized. For years, video game movies—and this franchise in particular—have had a reputation for going totally off the rails into cheesy, over-the-top nonsense. But this one? It gives you everything you actually want when you buy a ticket: real tension, honest-to-goodness fear, and pure entertainment from start to finish. It just flat-out works.
The smartest choice director Zach Cregger made right out of the gate was wiping the slate completely clean. He doesn’t try to connect this to the old movies, and he doesn’t bog down the plot with twenty years of messy Hollywood baggage. Instead, he treats it as a total reboot that goes straight back to the roots of the games. You get the iconic tone, the setting, and the atmosphere that made gamers fall in love with the franchise, but it’s an original survival story that lets him build suspense the right way.
At the center of the nightmare is Brian, played brilliantly by Austin Abrams. Brian isn't an elite soldier, an undercover cop, or a martial arts expert. He’s just a normal, working-class courier driving across Colorado to drop off time-sensitive medical deliveries. After finishing his last scheduled run delivering an organ to a regional hospital, he gets offered an urgent, high-priority drop up in Raccoon City. It pays double his usual rate, and while he just wants to clock out and head home, the extra cash is too good to pass up.
What makes you root for Brian right away is that he has real personal stakes before a single monster even shows up. As he’s driving into brutal Colorado winter weather, he’s on the phone with his girlfriend, who hits him with huge news: she’s pregnant. Right there, you see a guy at a massive crossroads in his life. He’s wrestling with the terror of becoming a dad, figuring out commitment, and wondering how to grow up—all while trying to navigate an icy highway in the dark.
Then the night goes from complicated to insane. Brian accidentally hits a woman wandering in the middle of the road. Being a decent guy, he stops, helps her into his car, and tries to get her to a hospital. A police officer pulls him over to help, but before they can get moving, the injured woman mutates into a vicious, zombie-like creature and brutally kills the cop. Brian's car is trashed, he’s stranded in freezing temperatures on the outskirts of Raccoon City, and he realizes he has to walk right into a bio-hazard nightmare just to stay alive and finish the delivery.
Austin Abrams carries this whole movie, and his performance as an "everyman" is fantastic. A lot of times in movies like this, an ordinary guy gets thrown into an outbreak and magically turns into an action hero within twenty minutes. That never happens here. Brian stays Brian. He’s terrified, he’s cautious, and he spends half the movie muttering anxious thoughts under his breath—saying the exact same things you’d be mumbling if you were stuck in his shoes.
Even better, he doesn't suddenly know how to shoot. He’s never held a gun before, and when he finally gets his hands on one, he’s flat-out terrible with it. He misses shots, he fumbles, and he panics. Because he can’t shoot his way out of problems, he has to rely on his head, his adrenaline, and his desperate drive to survive and get back home. The few side characters who pop up—the cop at the start, an infected survivor he runs across—serve their purpose, push the story along, and step aside. This is completely Brian’s story, and Abrams makes him someone you genuinely care about.
From a directing standpoint, Zach Cregger proves his horror instincts are the real deal. In a genre where cheap, loud jump scares can ruin a movie, Cregger shows great restraint. He knows that the scariest thing is the monster you’re waiting for that doesn’t show up. Brian will round a pitch-black corner, your shoulders tense up, you brace for an attack, and… nothing happens. You let your guard down, thinking he found a safe spot in a house, and that is when the attack hits. The pacing never drags; it only slows down just long enough to let you catch your breath before tightening the screws again.
The film also looks great without running into modern horror's biggest visual flaw: shooting everything so dark that you can’t see what’s happening. Even in the middle of the night in a snowstorm, the lighting keeps the mood thick and claustrophobic while letting you see every creepy detail on the screen. The camera angles really sell the panic, too. In the third act, as Brian runs down the street toward the hospital, the camera looks up at monsters perched on rooftops, making it feel like the whole city is caving in on top of him. There’s another sequence inside an elevator shaft that cranks the tension through the roof.
The sound work matches the visuals beat for beat. You hear every wet, sticky crunch of gore, the sickening sounds of creatures spitting acid, and the heavy breathing in pitch-black rooms. The score does its job by backing up the dread without blasting over the actors or drowning out the sound effects.
My only real gripe comes at the very end. The movie relies on fantastic practical effects, makeup, and creature suits for the vast majority of the run time, which makes the monsters feel disturbingly real. But when Brian faces the final creature, the film pivots hard to heavy CGI. It stands out in a bad way compared to the great practical work that came before it, and it pulls you out of the moment right when things should feel most intense.
Even with that CGI bump at the finish line, this is hands-down one of the best video game adaptations ever made, and one of the most entertaining, edge-of-your-seat horror movies of the year.
Grade: A-
Resident Evil is currently playing in theaters everywhere
