RESIDENT EVIL (2026) ★
This review contains spoilers.
Zach Cregger appeared on the scene as a horror director who wants to say something important—both Barbarian and Weapons set out with the intention to spook us (and occasionally make us laugh) but they also arrive with a trenchant air, as though wanting to double as snapshots of our cultural zeitgeist. Neither of these two films succeeds perfectly in this regard, but Weapons certainly makes a spirited effort, dramatizing its social observations with a large, varied cast (each with their own named segment, no less, interlocked in an ambitious achronogical structure).
So it's something of a surprise to have him turn in Resident Evil, a kind of Minimum Viable Movie. Befitting its video game origins, this is largely just a story of one guy progressing through a set of increasingly fucked up encounters. This builds to a climax (in which he basically becomes someone else's fucked up encounter) and then it just stops. Aside from this and one wan subplot, there are no real character dynamics to speak of: nearly every secondary character we see on screen gets gruesomely wiped out within minutes. Ninety percent of the dialogue is some variant on "oh fuck." We have themes, I guess—what movie doesn't?—but to say that this movie is "about" the body, or science, or the gig economy is laughable. And speaking of laughs: although the movie is funny, it doesn't really have anything that might qualify as a comic setpiece, just a few bits of repeated misfortune which eventually snowball into recurring jokes.
And yet. There's something to be said for a movie that sets out to do only one thing. This is a movie about a dumb dude running from gross shit that pops out at him: it understands that its whole mission is to scare us or at least give us something weird to look at approximately every ninety seconds. And it executes superbly on this understanding, without momentum-sapping excavations of character psychology or detours into tedious lore. Is this just junk food? In a way, but not in the sense where you're consuming something made without care— if it's junk food, it's the kind that's been engineered to an unhealthy perfection: everything shorn off but the pleasures. It's important to note that we never lose the sense that we're in capable hands: Cregger knows how to design a space, block a scene, frame a shot, move a camera, all in the service of modulating suspense and surprise (this one is a feast for the jump scare enjoyers). Oh yeah, and the creature design is terrific. There are a few flat moments and minor disappointments—why cast Kali Reis if you're not going to put her physicality to work?—but most of it is just plain fun. A delectable piece of Halloween candy.
jbushnell
