(trailer review) - Resident Evil

There have been a couple of attempts at making Resident Evil work properly on screen and honestly, I still don’t know why they keep struggling with it.

Because to me, the answer always seemed simple—stick as closely to the games as possible, make changes where necessary for film, but keep the core of what made the games work. That way, you satisfy the fans and you can still bring in general audiences if the story looks compelling enough.

But after watching this teaser… I’m still not fully convinced.

And that’s the strange thing because this comes from Zach Cregger, the director behind Barbarian and Weapons, and those recent horror projects have been genuinely strong. So there’s clearly talent behind this.

The teaser itself is definitely creepy though.

It opens with a man walking through heavy snow towards a house. He knocks on the door, enters, and explains he had trouble on the road and needs to use the telephone. Straight away, the atmosphere feels cold, isolated and uneasy.

From there, the trailer slowly builds tension through quick flashes and fragments.

We see him trying to use the phone, desperately attempting to make a connection while repeatedly saying “hello” into dead silence. Eventually the line connects and he leaves a message for someone he loves, apologising for being disconnected earlier before saying something has happened and there’s a chance they may never speak again.

That entire voice message plays over the chaos unfolding around him.

While he’s speaking, we get flashes of him being chased, searching the house for weapons, hearing creatures screeching somewhere nearby, and trying to grab keys from what looks like a dead body… only for the body to suddenly move.

There’s also a genuinely unsettling shot of him going down into what looks like a sewer tunnel where, sitting deep in the darkness, is this huge human-like figure. Naked, oversized and fully visible with some dark shadows on it.

That image alone feels like something straight out of a nightmare, or at least, almost lifted straight from the original Blade movie with Wesley Snipes.

The teaser keeps escalating from there. Arms burst through an open door reaching for the walls outside, creatures lunge at him as he slams doors shut behind him, an overturned police car sits wrecked as he approaches it, and there are shots of him possibly seeing dead bodies or these creatures for the first time as he discovers them.

There’s a great moment where he’s running through the street, looks upwards, and these creatures suddenly begin falling from rooftops onto cars around him.

The whole teaser is backed by the constant sound of a busy tone from the phone line, which honestly makes everything feel even more tense and hopeless.

And right before the title card appears, he quietly says: “I love you.”

Then the tone continues.

I can’t lie, visually and atmospherically this looks strong. It definitely leans more into horror than action, which is probably the right move. I’m just still not fully sold yet on whether this is finally going to be the adaptation that truly gets Resident Evil right.

But the potential is definitely there especially as I have heard, it is not based on any one computer game story, but a story within that world; that is what might save this, if they do it right!