Raccoon City used to be a company town. By the time Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City opens, the company has left, the streets are emptying, and whatever the Umbrella Corporation buried beneath the place is about to come up for air.
What is Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City about?
Johannes Roberts' 2021 film returns the long-running franchise to its roots, setting the story in 1998 and drawing on the secrets of the Spencer mansion and the town that grew up around Umbrella's headquarters. The pharmaceutical giant once made Raccoon City boom; its departure left a hollowed-out Midwestern town with shuttered shops, a skeleton police force and residents who have nowhere else to go. Over a single night, something the corporation left behind breaks loose. Townspeople begin to change in ways that are horrifying and irreversible, and a handful of survivors, among them police officers and a young woman returning to the town she fled, are forced to band together. Their goal is twofold: stay alive until dawn and piece together what Umbrella was really doing behind its locked doors. The film moves between the decaying town centre, the police station and the mansion on the hill, staging its set-pieces in cramped corridors and rain-soaked streets rather than open battlefields.
About the cast
Kaya Scodelario and Robbie Amell head a cast that also includes Hannah John-Kamen, Tom Hopper, Avan Jogia, Donal Logue, Neal McDonough and Lily Gao. Johannes Roberts directs, working with an ensemble drawn from British, Canadian and American film and television.
Context & significance
The Resident Evil name has been attached to video games, animated features and an earlier run of live-action films, and this entry deliberately positions itself as a fresh start rather than a continuation. Its production credits span France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, and it runs a little under two hours. Genre-wise it sits at the meeting point of Action, Horror and Sci-Fi: the science-fiction premise of a corporate experiment gone wrong supplies the engine, the horror comes from the town's transformation, and the action arrives in bursts as the survivors move from one refuge to the next. Fans of the source material will notice the period setting and the emphasis on specific locations; newcomers can follow the story without any prior knowledge, since the film explains Umbrella and the town from scratch.
Watching Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City on Ktime
K-Time carries Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City with a Persian dub and Persian subtitles, so you can choose the dubbed track or the original audio with Farsi text. You can read this page without an account; to stream the film, sign in to K-Time. The service is designed around Persian-speaking viewers outside Iran, and the film is part of its international action and horror selection.