A medical courier on a frozen road opens a package he really shouldn't. That's the entire pitch for Zach Cregger's take on Resident Evil, now playing in theatres, and it wastes zero time getting into trouble.

Bryan, played by Austin Abrams, isn't the square-jawed operative the games trained you to expect. He's an ordinary guy with no combat training and no plan, just the very reasonable urge to not die in Umbrella Corporation's latest biological screwup. The Free Press Journal gave the film 2.5 stars, and its review makes clear Cregger isn't interested in treating the source material like scripture. He's using it as a sandbox for horror and dark comedy instead.

That instability is apparently the film's best trick. The review notes it deliberately withholds any signal on whether a scene is building to a scream or a laugh, and that tension between the two registers as the film's sharpest asset. Bryan's terror isn't stoic action-hero posturing, it's genuine disbelief, and per the review, that's often funnier than any joke the script actually writes.

Where it stumbles

The structural problem, according to the review, is that Bryan's night becomes a chain of increasingly grotesque encounters, one mutation per location, before the plot marches toward an ending you can see coming from the start. Energy never dips, but the storytelling starts to feel like a checklist someone's ticking off. A subplot involving Bryan and his girlfriend gets singled out too, described as struggling to earn its place amid everything else going on.

The cast around Abrams gets less room to work. Paul Walter Hauser reportedly makes something of his corporate villain, but the review says most of the supporting players end up as company for Bryan, obstacles in his path, or mouthpieces for exposition. Abrams carries it, and the film knows exactly whose shoulders it's resting on.

The creatures do the heavy lifting

Where Resident Evil is said to really deliver is in its design work. The infected keep finding new, unpleasant ways to stop resembling humans, and the review credits the effects team with giving the film a genuinely squirm-worthy visual language, more personality on the monsters than on several of the humans.

Cinematographer Dariusz Wolski reportedly leans on the games' first-person tension, keeping the camera close to Bryan so that darkness and tight corners do a lot of the scaring themselves. The score, credited to the Holladays, is described as moving comfortably between dread and adrenaline, and even the sound of boots on snow apparently carries menace.

The read from Free Press Journal is a horror movie that understands genre needn't behave itself, wrapped around a story whose shape you've seen before. Entertaining, yes. Haunting, not quite. Whether Cregger gets a sequel to build on that unstable tone is now the only question worth asking.