Resident Evil

Zach Cregger's follow-up to Barbarian and Weapons is a Resident Evil movie that mostly ignores the games' lore and just tries to feel like playing one. Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier who takes a night job hauling precious cargo up into the mountains to a hospital in Raccoon City. The Umbrella Corporation's t-Virus does what the t-Virus does. Zach Cherry, Kali Reis, and Paul Walter Hauser fill out the small ensemble. It runs a tight 90 minutes, co-written by Cregger and Shay Hatten (John Wick, Army of the Dead), and it premiered at Fantastic Fest this week with a 97 on Rotten Tomatoes out of the gate.

Cregger cracked something the last twenty years of video game movies couldn't. Instead of adapting a plot the games barely have, he adapts the sensation of playing one — the inventory panic, the corridor dread, the way you creep around a corner sure something's about to eat your face. Abrams is the whole movie. He's on screen almost every minute and turns a nervy delivery guy into a genuine star turn, funny when he needs to be funny and gutted when the night starts eating him alive. Cregger's craft has leveled up again since Weapons: the mid-budget mountain-town production design looks expensive, the sound work is mean, and the setpieces are staged with real geography instead of the shaky-cam mush most of these things drown in. Hauser's a scene-thief in his handful of minutes. And Cregger keeps his weird sense of humor without ever using a joke to let the audience off the hook.

It's more goofy than truly scary. If you came in wanting the slow-burn dread of Barbarian's first hour or Weapons' creeping wrongness, this is a different pitch — closer to a haunted-house ride than a nightmare. The lore fans will grumble too. Series icons are demoted or absent, and the film is happy to gesture at Umbrella without engaging with any of the mythology people spent thirty years memorizing. A few of the supporting parts are functional at best; you can feel Cregger keeping the ensemble small so nobody pulls focus off Abrams, but it means Reis and Cherry get less to do than their talent warrants.

If you liked Crank, 28 Days Later, or Evil Dead 2 more than you liked the actual Resident Evil movies, this is your Saturday. Cregger heads who want another slow-cook mystery box will feel the tonal switch and might not love it. Purists who need Leon, Jill, and a specific mansion staircase in a specific order should just replay the remake.

Worth it lands because the craft is real and the ambition is honest about its scale. Ninety lean minutes, a lead performance that carries the whole thing, staging that respects the audience's eyes, and a director who figured out the actual translation problem instead of pretending it wasn't there. It doesn't scale Barbarian's heights, and it isn't trying to. Nothing here reads as a sermon; Cregger is telling a scary joke about a guy having the worst night of his life, and he lets the story do the talking. That's the whole assignment, and he clears it.