Zach Cregger — director of Barbarian and Weapons, with a blank check for any horror movie he wants — made the eighth Resident Evil film. He has never seen the other seven. Asked whether it is a sequel, prequel, or “universe-expanding retro-reboot,” he shrugged: “I couldn’t really say. I’ve never seen one.” Jacobin’s Eileen Jones thinks that is exactly the right attitude, and reviews the result as a stand-alone picture rather than an adaptation.

The plot is lean: Austin Abrams plays Bryan, a medical courier driving a beat-up car without tire chains up a snowy mountain road to deliver an unidentified package to a rural Raccoon City hospital. The horror escalates on a farmhouse staircase, in a not-quite-ordinary dog, and among mutants in a hospital with twenty-eight floors and no working elevator. The film’s real subject, per Jones, is denial:

  • Bryan’s repeated lines — “That didn’t happen,” “That wasn’t real” — while everyone around him is bitten, zombified, and mutated
  • Umbrella Corporation’s representatives (Paul Walter Hauser and Zach Cherry) dismiss a biotech catastrophe as a minor “human error”
  • But it is not ordinary people’s fault: “As systems collapse all around them, a job these days is a hard-won lifeline”
  • The package turns out not to be a McGuffin but the infection’s cure, raising the stakes without exposition

Jones’s case rests on craft. The mountain-road sequence is built from deep-focus shots of the frozen landscape, phone calls that drop out at the worst conversational moments, and a police light bar left flashing in the background as a landmark for where the crisis began. She catches deliberate quotation: the catatonic woman’s rigor-mortis arms framing Bryan’s head, recreating the shot from Kurosawa’s Rashomon — a film that is itself a referendum on a culture fallen into a moral abyss. Add The Thing, Alien, Night of the Living Dead, and a Die Hard beat (barefoot, twenty-eight floors, a too-late apology phone call).

The argument underneath the fun is the one worth saving: a genre movie can say something about collapse without a speech, because a corporate disaster rebranded as “human error” is not satire, it is Tuesday. Ninety-five minutes, three for three for Cregger, and “delightful as hell.”