Diana Cedeño, PhD
I’ve always thought that what makes a good horror movie is the feeling it leaves you with after it ends. That feeling doesn’t have to be fear; what matters is that something stays with you. But that response also depends on your connection to the film and the expectations you bring to it. Those expectations were especially relevant when I watched Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil (2026). As a fan of the games, I came with an open mind. I knew Leon S. Kennedy, Ada Wong, or even Alice weren’t in it, so I was prepared for a different story. By the end, though, I found myself drawn to its protagonist’s ordinary concerns: earning extra money (and in this economy?), getting the job done, and trying to help. That connection made his eventual transformation particularly unsettling. Before his transformation, Bryan (Austin Abrams) is a medical courier trying to get through a difficult assignment. His circumstances become increasingly grotesque, but there is something familiar about his initial predicament: he has work to finish and personal concerns that cannot simply be put aside.
Bryan’s fate raises a question that extends beyond survival horror: what can responsibility and perseverance actually guarantee? We often expect a story to reward the person who keeps trying, especially when that effort also benefits others. That expectation echoes a familiar promise of the American Dream: hard work and perseverance will eventually pay off. Resident Evil gives viewers a reason to anticipate that reward when Bryan’s delivery becomes a potential rescue mission. His package contains a stabilizer that researchers need to develop a cure, making the completion of his assignment a possible means of saving both himself and others. Yet, the ending breaks the expected connection between completing the task and being saved. Bryan reaches his destination and delivers what is needed, but he cannot stop his own transformation. Accomplishment and catastrophe arrive together.
Bryan’s ordinariness – he’s just trying to make a bit of extra money
No Good Deed Pays Overtime
Bryan’s appeal begins with his ordinariness. His clothes, his manner of speaking, and his willingness to take an undesirable assignment for extra cash made him recognizable to me as someone trying to get through the workday. Yet being a sympathetic worker does not make him an uncomplicated model of virtue. His early argument with his girlfriend, Michelle, about her pregnancy reveals tensions that cannot be resolved by simply completing a delivery. He is imperfect, but he also recognizes his shortcomings and tries to do better. Resident Evil does not need him to be flawless for his suffering to trouble us.
That capacity for concern extends beyond his personal relationships. After striking a pedestrian while navigating a dark, snowy road, Bryan tries to get the injured woman to a hospital. Before she becomes a threat to him, she is someone who needs assistance. His encounter with the infected little girl makes the danger of that impulse especially painful. Watching him approach her, after seeing her foot, I was asking myself, “Why would you do that?” Yet the question exposes an uncomfortable tension: the instinct to help that makes him sympathetic also leaves him vulnerable. Her bite makes that vulnerability literal.
Bryan’s predicament also invites a critique of meritocracy: the belief that effort and ability determine who succeeds. He perseveres, solves problems, and eventually completes his assignment, but none of these accomplishments guarantees his survival. His compassion adds another expectation to this promise of reward: that being good should count for something. The film frustrates both expectations. Bryan’s failure to save himself cannot simply be explained by a failure to work hard enough or care enough.
Bryan tries to help
Capitalism gives this disconnect a concrete setting. Bryan enters the crisis as a courier negotiating extra pay, while Umbrella’s laboratory accident creates dangers far beyond the scope of his assignment. Within the Resident Evil games’ history, Umbrella was founded by Ozwell E. Spencer, Edward Ashford, and James Marcus. Reading the film against that corporate background brings the contrast between proletariat and bourgeoisie into focus: Bryan sells his labor for a little more money, while those who own and control the corporation command the resources and research that shape his conditions of survival. His additional pay is compensation for a delivery; their ownership gives them a claim to corporate profits and power over production. Yet it is Bryan’s body that absorbs the consequences when that production becomes catastrophic. Umbrella turns anxieties surrounding Big Pharma into bodily horror, exposing the distance between those who control an enterprise and those left to navigate its dangers.
The Troubles of Capitalism and BioPower
Bryan’s journey brings the relationship between capitalism and control over life into focus. Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower describes how power operates through the administration of bodies and populations, including their health, productivity, and survival. He connects this management of life to capitalism’s need for productive bodies. Many of us recognize the pressure to work while sick, to organize our lives around a shift, or to keep performing when our bodies need rest. Bryan’s predicament gives that pressure a grotesque form: his body continues the labor needed to deliver a possible cure while becoming increasingly mutated and desperate for treatment. By the end, he is physically unrecognizable, yet we remember the person whose body has undergone this transformation. How often do we feel estranged from our own bodies when the demands of work leave us exhausted or unwell? His transformation gives horrifying shape to the possibility that fulfilling our obligations can come at the expense of our health, and sometimes our own existence.
Bryan rises to the emergency – but is he rewarded?
Completing the Job, Losing the Self
The laboratory is where Resident Evil‘s competing trajectories meet. Bryan delivers the package, and the researchers begin developing the cure. Then his body turns against both him and the people who might save him, consuming the researchers as his transformation unfolds. Their incorporation into the same monstrous body can be read as a disturbing image of shared vulnerability under capitalism. The courier and the scientists occupy different positions within the organization of labor, they find themselves in different sections of the hierarchy, but neither Bryan’s perseverance nor the researchers’ expertise protects them from the catastrophe. This does not mean that everyone suffers equally. Rather, the scene suggests that the dangers produced within a corporate system can engulf everyone, even those working to repair its failures or those who were seen as more protected or with more privilege.
In the end, what stayed with me from Resident Evil was how little control Bryan ultimately had, even when he did what seemed right. He kept going, helped others, and completed his delivery, yet none of this could secure his survival. That vulnerability feels familiar in a world dominated by capitalism, where our health is shaped by power and the conditions of our lives exceed what our individual effort can change. We cannot work hard enough or behave well enough to guarantee that those conditions will spare us. Perhaps the most unsettling possibility raised by Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil is that we might recognize ourselves in Bryan: doing everything we can while discovering how much was never ours to control.
Diana Cedeño, PhD, is a sociologist and family science scholar whose work examines inequality, social exclusion, and education. She works in Research Development at Lehigh University and is an enthusiastic horror film viewer and gamer.
