The studio behind the Resident Evil franchise is Constantin Film. I am not sure they make any other movies, nor do I care enough to do the research to find out. Critics of Catholicism, some of whom are in my own family, have blamed their lack of observing the Sabbath on the sameness of the liturgy. To them, every week is the same, and the readings repeat themselves every three years. Such opinions miss the point of the Mass, but on the surface, they are correct that there is a cycle to these things. Another aspect of these aspersions that is unfair to the Faith is that it overlooks the need for active engagement in the Sacraments. Catholicism is a living religion, not just a set of rituals to be memorized and performed. What all this is getting at is that, unlike Constantin Film’s cinematic fixation, Catholicism does have some variety. With this newest Resident Evil (2026), they seem to be trying something new, which deserves some credit. Nonetheless, it is potentially the worst of them all for this Catholic, and I am here to tell you why.

Though Resident Evil usually begins with a superpowered heroine or a familiar video-game character, this one focuses on Bryan Hodukavich (Austin Abrams), an ordinary medical courier finishing what he expects to be his last delivery of the night. Bryan is already distracted because his girlfriend Michelle (voiced by Sara Paxton) has just told him that she is pregnant, news he is clearly not prepared to process. Before he can go home and face that particular responsibility, a nurse offers him double pay to make an urgent delivery outside the normal service zone to Raccoon City General Hospital. Bryan accepts, which turns out to be a spectacularly poor career decision. Driving through a snowstorm while talking with Michelle, he hits a woman who suddenly appears in the road. He follows her bloody footprints into the woods, finds her badly injured, and brings her back toward his car. A police officer arrives and agrees to transport the woman while Bryan continues with his medically sensitive package, only for the patrol car to crash moments later. The officer is dead, the woman disappears, and Bryan soon discovers that she is considerably less dead than she should be. He takes the officer’s pistol and finally shoots her, accidentally putting a bullet through his own engine in the process. Forced to continue on foot, Bryan encounters an infected dog whose face splits apart before attacking him, escapes into a farmhouse, and takes a shotgun from the wall. The house belongs to the infected woman and her husband, who is also zombified. Bryan kills them both, but tendrils emerge from the woman’s corpse and pull the two bodies together into a grotesque mass of flesh and limbs. Catholic teaching about the resurrection of the body has once again been replaced by something considerably less appealing. Bryan flees in the couple’s truck, crashes while trying to force his way through a locked gate, and resumes his journey on foot. In a tunnel clogged with abandoned vehicles, he crawls through a recreational vehicle (RV) and discovers a frightened little girl hiding inside. His instinct is to help her until he sees that one of her feet has mutated into tentacles. She attacks and bites his arm, forcing him to shoot her, while the amalgamated creature from the farmhouse continues growing as it absorbs more victims and pursues him. Bryan is eventually picked up by Maxine (Kali Reis), an Umbrella Corporation enforcer, and Paul (Paul Walter Hauser), an Umbrella scientist. They reveal that Bryan’s supposedly routine package actually contains a crucial component needed to complete a cure for the pathogen causing the outbreak. Now infected himself, Bryan has considerably more personal interest in seeing the delivery completed. When Maxine stops to rescue a woman from approaching zombies, she efficiently shoots the infected before disappearing into the darkness. Bryan goes looking for her, only to watch unseen tentacles drag her body away as he unsuccessfully tries to retrieve her car keys. Returning to the vehicle, he finds Paul being seized as well, leaving Bryan alone once more. He runs through Raccoon City, passing increasingly bizarre mutations, including a bloated infected creature that bursts into a swarm of vermin and zombies that hurl themselves from rooftops to reach him. By the time Bryan reaches Raccoon City General Hospital, his bite has spread visibly up his arm. He breaks into the parking garage and, believing he may not survive, records an emotional message for Michelle. A voice over the hospital intercom then tells him that the scientists desperately need his package on the twenty-eighth floor and instructs him to take the stairs because the elevators are unsafe. Bryan manages four floors before deciding that twenty-four more are beyond him and takes the elevator anyway. Almost immediately, an infected patient above begins spitting acid through the elevator ceiling while the ever-growing amalgamation creature climbs the shaft beneath him. Bryan manipulates the acid-spewing monster into attacking his pursuer and escapes, only to enter a maternity ward transformed into a nightmare of bloody cocoons, tentacles, and infected infants. He inadvertently awakens the creatures but is able to flee onto a ruined sky bridge, where the amalgamation climbs the outside of the hospital toward him. Using his last bullet, Bryan shoots the handle barricading the maternity ward doors, releasing the infected horde so that they tumble onto the larger monster and send it crashing downward. Bryan finally reaches the laboratory and gives the package to Umbrella scientist Carl (Zach Cherry), whose team immediately synthesizes the cure. Unfortunately, Bryan’s infection is now too advanced to wait politely. His arm mutates into tentacles, his body transforms, and he begins involuntarily killing the scientists while desperately reaching for the syringe that could save him. Carl and the others mostly try to hide instead of administering the cure, and one by one they are killed. The final scientist obtains the syringe but hesitates long enough for the transformed Bryan to kill him as well, sending the cure falling out of reach. The film ends with National Guard helicopters arriving over Raccoon City General while Bryan, now a monstrous mass of mutated flesh, stands atop the hospital and roars at them.

Resident Evil is about an entire night spent trying to deliver the means of saving everyone else, even though Bryan cannot save himself. It is certainly different from the earlier films, but for this Catholic, watching a frightened expectant father pass through a grotesque maternity ward before becoming a monster himself provides Constantin Film with yet another opportunity to make the franchise unpleasant in an entirely new way. Again, they deserve some credit for their efforts. The previous iterations all have these globe-spanning plots, whereas this one is centered on one man trying to complete a mission and stay alive. In this sense, it is more of a horror flick instead of sharing that label with the action genre. That is all well and good, but it falls for the one trope of horror movies that is the number one reason I do not like them: evil wins. I suppose the title kind of gives this away, but as a Catholic, I cannot stand this kind of conclusion. One of the great things about Christianity is that we already know how this ends, especially for those of us who believe. What I am speaking to is the ultimate triumph of God over the forces of darkness. Nonetheless, such ideas are far from this movie. Here, the fact that we root for Bryan throughout makes his final transformation that much more difficult to accept, which is made worse by how close he comes to a cure. I do not enjoy listening to him be open to Michelle potentially aborting their baby, but he eventually comes around to the right way of thinking. Along the way, he displays concern for those he encounters and a heroic determination to complete his mission. A man like that deserves better.

Unfortunately, you are not going to get better from Resident Evil. I say that for a few reasons, one of which is that, as mentioned in the synopsis, the film gets progressively grosser. It reaches its apogee in the maternity ward scene, which also plays directly into Bryan’s earlier anxiety about Michelle’s pregnancy and his willingness to consider abortion. Indeed, while talking to Michelle, he uses the classic defense used by those who consider themselves to be pro-choice: “your body, your choice.” The problem with that for Catholics is that another human life is involved, one possessing inherent dignity from conception and therefore not merely part of the mother’s body. The usual response is to point out that a fetus does not yet possess the independence or capacities of an adult and cannot survive outside its mother at the earliest stages of development. From a Catholic perspective, however, human dignity does not depend upon independence, development, or the ability to exercise choice. A newborn baby is also radically dependent upon others, yet its dependence does nothing to diminish its humanity or dignity. If you want to hear arguably the biggest troll statement to insert here vis-à-vis today’s movie: what about the lives of these monsters? Honestly, I have no idea how to apply Catholic logic here, but they do seem to have been changed into unthinking beasts bent solely on death and destruction. In such a bizarre scenario, it is morally licit to use proportionate force to defend oneself and others against an immediate lethal threat. Oddly enough, it is during Bryan’s misadventures that he comes to the conclusion that he was wrong to want to take the “easy” way out of fatherhood. During his recording for Michelle, he tells her that he was afraid of change and growing up. Yet, his experiences, even when he is sure he is going to die, show him that life is worth it. That is as Catholic a stance as they come.

My stance on Resident Evil is that it is not worth seeing. Then again, I am notoriously not a fan of horror films. Apparently, I did not fully understand what I was getting into with this latest iteration in this tired franchise. It is grotesque and not for me.