The film begins with Bryan as a medical courier in a hospital delivering an organ in a cooler bag while talking on the phone to his girlfriend Michelle (voiced by Sara Paxton), who found out she's pregnant, and him being unsure on how to talk about it, saying it could be a false positive, and things like that. He delivers the organ, and a doctor immediately offers him twice the pay to go to Raccoon City to deliver another item. Despite that Bryan promised his girlfriend that he'd be home in twenty minutes, he takes the job for the extra cash, and makes his way driving through icy streets, and accidentally hits a woman on the road. He goes out to find her, and she's frozen up and bloody. He brings her into his car, and the mayhem starts from there, with her being an infected monster, killing a cop who had pulled him over and offered to escort him to the hospital, and Bryan, who has only ever shot guns in video games and not in real life, is freaked out and inept. He can't shoot well, he accidentally electrifies himself when he jumps an electric fence to escape her, and throughout the night and on his way to the hospital, he encounters many monsters, with tentacles coming out of their bodies to grab him and mutate with him.
It's a really fun horror movie, that has an atmospheric, creepy vibe to it, with the dark snowy night, that evokes the style of the game without using any stories from it. Austin Abrams, from Cregger's previous film Weapons, as well of Euphoria fame, is a really likable, relatable lead in it. As Bryan, he is a normal person working a gig job, who messes up with his girlfriend when he is trying to be supportive but sounds indecisive (when she asks him what he thinks of the pregnancy, he goes "It's your body, your choice," thinking that's the feminist boyfriend answer she wants to hear, but it doesn't help her); finds that shooting a gun is much harder in real life, like when he can't shoot padlocks off of chains or has trouble assembling a gun (as he says to Paul Walter Hauser's scientist character, "I'm not a gun guy."); and and accidentally shoots the engine of his own car when trying to defend himself from the first monster. The humor in the film helps the film feel more engaging in a "you wouldn't be able to survive this either" kind of way, like with Bryan's constant cursing or his muttering to himself anytime he's annoyed by somebody lecturing him.
Without getting too much into spoilers, there is a scene where Bryan is at a dire moment after surviving a lot of monster attacks, and he leaves a voicemail message for his girlfriend, not being certain if he will further survive. It’s a really good scene, and it reminded me a lot of a scene from the 1986 horror comedy Night of the Creeps, where alien slugs get into people’s brains and kill them. The main leads are two male best friends, and in the scene, one of them is listening to a message his friend left him after he got attacked, as a goodbye message and describing what the slugs feel like inside of him, and it’s a really sad and heartbreaking scene. I don’t know if Zach Cregger got any inspiration from this scene, but it came to my mind while watching Resident Evil.
There's an excellent elevator sequence late in the film, a sequence with Bryan screaming and running down a city street as people fall from buildings onto parked cars, and a POV shot modeled after first-person shooter games like Resident Evil, Doom, and Duke Nukem. It really does well in the survival horror structure, and makes the film more immersive to watch. I did feel that the film ended abruptly, when it felt like it could have still gone on a few minutes more, so that felt a little jarring as a viewer. But overall, it's a really good adaptation of the video game, and Cregger, an alum of the 2000s comedy sketch show The Whitest Kids You Know, has excelled in the last few years as a horror film director with this, Barbarian, and 2025's Oscar-winning Weapons. I recommend this film for fans of body horror and survival horror.
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