Austin Abrams in Resident Evil. Photograph: Dušan Martinček/Dušan Martinček/2026 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved. View image in fullscreen Austin Abrams in Resident Evil. Photograph: Dušan Martinček/Dušan Martinček/2026 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Horror films Review Resident Evil review – Zach Cregger’s rebooted action horror is a wild rollercoaster ride The Weapons director delivers a seat-edge thriller with a standout lead performance from Austin Abrams as an everyman navigating chaos
Prefer the Guardian on Google T ypically horror fans react to blatant on-screen stupidity with vocal derision. Don’t go in there! Girl, get out of the house! Guys, ignore that distress signal! But genre aficionados may find themselves falling a little bit in love with Bryan (Austin Abrams), the hapless de facto hero of the new horror film Resident Evil . It’s not that Bryan is traditionally hunky, or even a caricatured version of a square-jawed warrior, like Bruce Campbell in his later Evil Dead outings. But Abrams is in possession of a Campbell-ish charm, even in the face of his character’s repeated blundering, as well as an everyman relatability that makes this wild carnival-ride movie play a little closer to the ground.
Read more Bryan is a courier – a glorified Postmates driver, in his own estimation – who postpones the end of his shift to take one last night-time run, driving an important item from one hospital to another in a snowstorm without the proper tires or four-wheel drive. After all, the distance and urgency means double pay. When he hits a mysterious woman who emerges suddenly on to a slick road, he’s drawn into a hellish outbreak that will look familiar to fans of the Resident Evil video game series (or maybe the previous six-movie Milla Jovovich franchise, which apparently drifted afield from the games’ storylines).
The key to Abrams’s winning performance as a perpetual loser is in how the actor and cowriter-director Zach Cregger take care to show Bryan stumbling his way through sloppy versions of doing the right thing. When he hits the clearly zonked woman, Bryan attempts to take her along on his hospital run. When he’s quickly pulled over by a cop, he makes little attempt to weasel out of his situation, attempting to prioritize his medical task. The man tries, even if some of his efforts in certain areas are lamentably weak (supporting his unseen girlfriend in a non-outbreak-related couple crisis) or understandably incompetent (wielding a firearm against undead creatures). His oscillations between overconfidence and panic make him a particularly fresh point-of-view character for a zombie/monster movie.
In short, he’s not unlike a guy who’s been dropped into a video game before learning the proper controls – in keeping with Cregger’s reported desire to replicate the experience of the game without adapting any of its stories directly. Abrams manages to humanize this unspoken and potentially arch conceit of an avatar learning the rules as he goes. It’s tempting to compare his many scenes without other human characters to silent comedy – only he’s not quiet enough to qualify, unleashing a hilarious symphony of profane and frustrated muttering. At one point, well after his life has been endangered multiple times, he can be heard complaining about his wet socks.
Good as Abrams is, alone and when playing opposite skeleton-crew supporting cast, he’s not exactly a one-man show, either; the guy behind the camera is his constant scene pa…