5 Movies to Watch If You Loved 2026’s Resident Evil

Video game movies have delivered plenty of entertaining surprises over the years, but Zach Cregger’s “Resident Evil” is the first to feel genuinely excellent. In our review, we argued that calling it the best video game adaptation ever made is not an exaggeration, particularly given the slim competition for that crown. The 95-minute thriller helps its own cause by largely disregarding established game lore and instead playing like a dramatisation of the most chaotic gaming session imaginable. It recreates the exhilaration of playing a video game while remaining unmistakably cinematic, reshaping the franchise through Cregger’s darkly comic sensibility rather than simply serving the source material.

If you’re looking for more films with the same energy, the earlier “Resident Evil” movies are not necessarily the best place to start. They may adhere more closely to the games, but they lack the gory, slapstick momentum that makes Cregger’s film so distinctive. Instead, these five movies share its spirit in different ways: some are inventive horror-comedies, some are acclaimed video game adaptations, and others translate gameplay mechanics to the screen with remarkable imagination. They range from celebrated favourites to divisive experiments, but each is worth watching if you want to recapture the adrenaline of that lethal one-way journey through Raccoon City.

By coincidence, “Resident Evil” is the second acclaimed video game adaptation this year to open with its protagonist learning that his girlfriend is pregnant. In Cregger’s film, the news motivates Bryan to push deeper into an infected Raccoon City as he fights to return home. In the Japanese hit “Exit 8,” adapted from the viral horror game of the same name, it is the final thing a commuter known only as The Lost Man (Kazunari Ninomiya) hears before becoming trapped in an endless network of Tokyo subway corridors. The similarities do not end there: director Genki Kawamura gives this liminal-space thriller the same kind of cinematic polish.

As in the game, survival depends on identifying anomalies in the repeating environment. If the protagonist continues forward after spotting one, for instance, he returns to the beginning. Kawamura and co-screenwriter Kentaro Hirase turn that simple mechanic into a film structured like a playthrough, with The Lost Man standing in for a gamer who struggles to understand the rules and keeps making obvious mistakes. Like Cregger, they recognise that video game stories are often more compelling when their characters repeatedly fail rather than effortlessly master every challenge. Their film differs, however, by expanding the world beyond the restricted viewpoint of its source game.

Mike Cheslik’s indie comedy hit is not a video game adaptation — although it certainly deserves one — but it was heavily influenced by let’s-play videos. Its second act shifts from a spoof of survival cinema into something resembling a slapstick run through “Zelda” or “Animal Crossing.” Jean (Ryland Tews), the hapless protagonist, is repeatedly outsmarted by beavers invading his apple orchard and is almost completely inept at trapping animals. His fortunes change when a Master Fur JTrapper (Wes Tank) takes an interest in him as a possible protégé, while the trapper’s daughter hopes to marry him. There is one condition: Jean must capture hundreds of beavers first.

“Hundreds of Beavers” applies video game logic to Jean’s gradual improvement, charting his hunting skills like the progression of a role-playing game character. The film has the frantic, brutally comic spirit of a vintage “Tom & Jerry” cartoon dragged into live action, yet its gaming influences are far more considered than the chaos might suggest. Even as a largely silent movie, it uses familiar imagery — including repeated trips to a merchant’s shop straight from “The Legend of Zelda” — to convey information and advance the story. Like “Resident Evil,” it rarely slows down, teaching its rules through action rather than explanation. It is one of the finest video game movies never to be based on an actual game.

Brian Yuzna’s body-horror satire was adored in Europe but savaged by American critics, remaining unreleased in the United States for three years after its premiere. Quietly, it became one of the most influential genre films for a new generation of filmmakers. Its impact can be felt in the outrageous finale of “The Substance” and in recent eat-the-rich black comedies, while its famously nauseating third act also seems to echo through Cregger’s work. Set in Beverly Hills, the film follows wealthy teenager Bill (Billy Warlock), who suspects that something is wrong with his parents and sister. After his sister’s boyfriend dies following the delivery of a mysterious tape apparently showing the family attending a murder orgy, Bill is no closer to discovering the truth.

Using the structure of a noir mystery, Bill searches for answers among his privileged classmates before eventually finding them beneath his own home. What follows is one of cinema’s most surreal gore-fests: part Sam Raimi-style gross-out comedy, part Salvador Dalí nightmare. The grotesque creature designs in “Resident Evil” owe as much to this groundbreaking film as they do to the video game itself. When Bryan encounters a body-fusing creature in a seemingly charming family home, it is hard not to suspect that Yuzna’s work was somewhere in Cregger’s thoughts during production.

A bungling hero with the potential to save humanity from an undead curse, yet who repeatedly derails himself through terrible decisions, sounds like a perfect description of Austin Abrams’ Bryan in “Resident Evil.” It also describes Bruce Campbell’s Ash Williams in Sam Raimi’s “Army of Darkness,” the film in which the horror icon becomes cinema’s Buster Keaton of gore. It is no surprise that both movies rank among the strongest entries in their respective franchises. Bryan is closer in tone to the Ash of “Evil Dead II,” but his character arc more closely resembles the later version: he slowly convinces himself that he is an action hero, even as one disastrous choice follows another.

During the final act at the Umbrella Corporation, Bryan’s greatest mistake is assuming that he has conquered every obstacle and will be celebrated for delivering the cure. He still has not considered how his choices fit into the larger situation. Ash fares no better. After killing a Deadite, he is hailed as a hero in the Middle Ages, only to endanger everyone through his contempt for rules — including his failure to remember the correct phrase needed to retrieve the Necronomicon. Both men believe they can save time by choosing the easy route. Raimi and Cregger share a taste for placing reckless, deeply flawed heroes at the centre of the action, then allowing disaster to unfold because those heroes are the ones in control.

The final recommendation will depend heavily on your tolerance for its first-person-shooter style. For some viewers, it is an exhilarating experiment; for others, it may trigger one of cinema’s most punishing headaches. Still, the brief first-person sequences in “Resident Evil” make this film especially relevant. Directed by Ilya Naishuller, who later made the more conventional Bob Odenkirk action film “Nobody,” it tests just how far a video game viewpoint can be extended within a feature-length narrative. Told entirely from the perspective of its unnamed protagonist, the film is a love letter to games that operate according to their own gloriously chaotic rules.

After awakening in an airship laboratory alongside Estelle (Haley Bennett), the protagonist escapes to Moscow while being pursued by mercenaries and struggling to recharge his cybernetic led. Sharlto Copley plays multiple characters who reappear after being killed, delivering exposition in the manner of respawning game figures. The journey moves through all the expected locations from a science-fiction shooter: abandoned warehouses, strip clubs, hotels, secret laboratories and cartoonishly sinister villains commanding armies of clones. None of it makes much sense, but that is beside the point if you can tune into the film’s frequency. It is built to overwhelm, hurling new obstacles at the screen faster than a gamer could process them. This is the hyperactive, fully overcharged version of Cregger’s “Resident Evil” formula — though its aesthetic will not work for everyone, so approach with caution.