The complaint you keep seeing online — 'it's not a real Resident Evil movie' — is worth taking seriously for about thirty seconds before you discard it. Leon isn't here. Claire isn't here. Ada Wong isn't here. What is here is the thing those characters exist inside: a world of escalating body horror, scarce ammo, found-document storytelling, and the particular dread of never quite knowing whether you're going to survive the next corridor. Cregger didn't adapt the franchise's characters. He adapted its grammar. The film follows Bryan Hodukavich, a hapless courier who gets caught in the Raccoon City outbreak with no preparation and no particular competence. He moves through locations that read like a greatest-hits of the games' environmental design — farmhouse, tunnel, hospital, sewer — and he finds weapons in exactly the order the games would grant them: handgun first, assault rifle later, always just shy of enough ammunition. There are typewriters in at least two scenes. This is not fan service. This is structural fidelity. The more interesting move is what Cregger does with information design. Bryan learns about the world the way a player does: through voice recordings, emails, terse NPC exchanges that do double work simultaneously. The infected girl in the tunnel — 'My mom bit me, I don't know where she went' — is a perfect distillation of the Resident Evil information economy. One sentence. Exposition and threat packed into eleven words. The mother is now a variable in the environment, unaccounted for, potentially anywhere. Cregger released a video explaining his intent: to replicate not just the Resi universe but the experience of playing it — the sensation of moving through a world of endlessly evolving horror. The interesting fan theory that's emerged online, that Bryan is functioning as an NPC precursor to a 'real' protagonist, leaving ammo caches and hints for whoever comes next, is either a planted reading or a genuinely emergent one. Either way it's the right reading. Shinji Mikami, the series creator, once said the horror works when the player genuinely isn't sure whether the character will live or die — 'death and survival need to be on a constant see-saw.' Bryan Hodukavich lives on that see-saw for the entire runtime. The correct comparison set here isn't the Paul W.S. Anderson Resident Evil films or the 2022 Netflix reboot. It's Kane Parsons's Backrooms and Genki Kawamura's Exit 8 — movies that treat video game mechanics as the subject matter rather than the delivery vehicle. Cinema has a long tradition of deconstructing other media (Les Enfants du Paradis taking apart theatre, Unbreakable and Logan doing the same to superhero comics), and what's happening with this cluster of game-aware films is something genuinely new: filmmakers who grew up with games using the camera to make you feel like a player, subject to the world's rules, gradually decoding its conventions. The yellow-painted walls. The indestructible barriers. The ambient logic of a rendered environment that needs you to stay inside it. The subsidiary characters were always the most interesting people in early Resident Evil anyway — Barry Burton's blundering loyalty, Brad Vickers's cowardice, the merchant's inexplicable omnipresence. The games gave you the heroes; the margins were where the actual texture lived. Cregger's film is set in those margins, and it turns out there's a whole movie there: just around the corner from Claire blasting zombies, three bullets, two lines of dialogue, and a voice recorder.
