Resident Evil Review | Fantastic Fest 2026
FANTASTIC FEST 2026 REVIEW
Few movies arrived at Fantastic Fest 2026 carrying more curiosity than Resident Evil.
Zach Cregger stepping into one of horror gaming’s most recognizable franchises immediately raised questions about what his version would look like, particularly after it became clear that the filmmaker had little interest in simply recreating familiar characters, monsters and storylines. Austin Abrams leads a movie designed to exist within the Resident Evil universe without becoming another direct adaptation of a specific game.
That decision gives Resident Evil room to breathe. It also creates the film’s biggest problem.
For all the violence, gore, comedy and relentless forward momentum Cregger brings to the material, this new Resident Evil spends much of its runtime caught between wanting the freedom of a standalone horror movie and carrying the expectations that inevitably come with the name on the poster.
The good news is that this may be the closest a live-action Resident Evil movie has come to recreating the experience of actually playing one of the games.
Not because Cregger is recreating specific levels or filling the screen with recognizable characters, but because of the film’s movement. There is a straightforward progression to the story that feels like pushing deeper into increasingly dangerous territory, encountering one problem after another while trying to survive long enough to reach whatever is waiting at the end.
At times, you can almost imagine what this movie might have looked like as an ambitious single-shot horror film. There is enough propulsion built into its structure that the approach could have complemented the feeling of navigating a game without an obvious escape route.
Cregger instead gives himself more freedom to experiment, and the results are frequently entertaining.
The violence delivers. The gore delivers. The movie can be genuinely funny, and there are sequences built around pure shock value that should play particularly well with a Fantastic Fest crowd.
There has already been discussion about comedy being removed during the development of the film, and some evidence of that remains onscreen. A handful of one-liners feel stranded, almost as though the connective comedic material surrounding them disappeared during the editing process. They are not enough to derail the movie, but they occasionally expose the tonal balancing act happening underneath everything else.
That balancing act extends to the horror.
Modern zombie movies increasingly seem convinced that zombies themselves are no longer enough. Infection needs another mutation. Creatures need another stage. Bodies need to transform into something larger, stranger or more elaborate.
Resident Evil falls into that trap.
There is plenty of monster-driven spectacle here, but considerably less of the straightforward zombie terror that helped establish this property in the first place. Escalation becomes the default, and eventually that escalation begins stripping away some of the simplicity that makes survival horror effective.
A zombie does not necessarily need an upgrade to be terrifying.
This is hardly a problem exclusive to Resident Evil. Recent genre films have repeatedly searched for ways to reinvent the infected, sometimes creating impressive imagery while losing the fundamental fear of being surrounded by something relentless, contagious and difficult to stop.
Cregger certainly finds ways to make his creatures disturbing. The issue is whether Resident Evil needed all of those additional layers.
Comparisons to the games are unavoidable.
The previous live-action movies eventually moved far enough away from their source material that recognizable pieces of Resident Evil sometimes felt grafted onto a separate action franchise. Characters and creatures from the games appeared, but their presence did not necessarily make the movies feel more like Resident Evil. The animated films have traditionally remained much closer to the established video-game continuity.
Cregger takes the opposite approach. Rather than forcing familiar names and monsters into his story, he largely gives himself permission to build something new.
Conceptually, that is a reasonable way to resurrect the franchise.
In execution, it leaves the movie facing an awkward question: At what point does a filmmaker gain so much independence from an established property that the name itself becomes difficult to justify?
That question hangs over Resident Evil throughout its runtime.
Taken purely as a horror movie, there is plenty to enjoy. It is fast, violent, funny, gross and unapologetically excessive. Abrams is placed at the center of an increasingly chaotic survival story, and Cregger knows how to build sequences around discomfort and sudden bursts of brutality.
But this is not simply an original Zach Cregger horror movie. It is Resident Evil.
An established IP carries baggage whether the filmmaker wants it or not. Audiences have spent decades with this universe across games, movies, animation and other media. Telling those viewers not to compare a new adaptation with what came before is almost impossible.
That becomes particularly complicated because the games themselves have evolved dramatically. Resident Evil has moved through traditional zombie horror, action-heavy spectacle, parasitic infections, isolated first-person horror and increasingly elaborate forms of biological terror. Even the source material has spent years asking what Resident Evil should be.
Cregger’s film does not completely solve that identity crisis.
It does, however, demonstrate that another live-action approach is possible.
That distinction matters. This isn’t a step backward for the franchise. Unfortunately, it doesn’t feel like a meaningful step forward either.
There is enough here for audiences looking for a bloody, over-the-top horror ride. The gore lands, the comedy periodically works, and the film’s momentum prevents its conceptual problems from completely overwhelming the experience.
What is missing is the thing that would make this interpretation feel necessary.
For longtime Resident Evil fans, that may ultimately be the dividing line. Someone looking for Cregger’s take on survival horror may have a good time. Someone looking for the next evolution of Resident Evil may leave wondering what this movie contributes to a franchise that has already reinvented itself countless times.
There is nothing inherently wrong with allowing this to exist as a standalone experiment. In fact, that may ultimately be the cleanest way to view it.
Resident Evil is entertaining. It is funny. It is violent. It is absolutely covered in gore.
But after all the mutations, bloodshed and attempts to separate itself from what came before, it still hasn’t completely figured out what kind of Resident Evil movie it wants to be.
3 out of 5
Reviewed as part of Horror Movies Uncut's Fantastic Fest 2026 coverage in Austin, Texas.
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