Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin has now revitalized two horror franchises that both deal with the villainous undead. In both Evil Dead Rise and The Mummy, Cronin displays a curiosity for using these tropes to display the rot at the heart of the nuclear family unit. In the former, it was clear that Cronin has taken up a mantle from that franchise’s creator, Sam Raimi, that went beyond simple narrative; with flesh being torn apart in increasingly humorous ways, the film laid bare a director whose influences sit squarely on his sleeve.
The Mummy is Cronin’s third feature, a noxious and gnarly enough reimagining of Universal’s franchise of the same name that began in 1932. But there isn’t much evidence of that connection. Instead there is much more Raimi-esque bleak humor, defenestration, a ton of bugs, and a frustrating plethora of clichés. An amusing film if not altogether convincing, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is protracted and exceedingly hampered by imitation.
Which isn’t to say that the film doesn’t hold attention. The film is nothing if not fiendish in its approach, throwing a ton of balls in the air that it doesn’t always hit. Much of the film feels like Cronin grabbed a bunch of different clothes off a rack at a clothing store only to end up wearing a bizarrely mismatched outfit that never really comes together. But eccentricity can be fun, and a broken clock is right twice a day, and so The Mummy does, every now and again, hit a distinctive note.
Cronin takes the legend of the mummy out of its sarcophagus by removing it from Egypt and throwing it into a domestic American home. Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is a journalist for a BBC-type outlet, stationed in Cairo with his nurse wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and their two kids Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastián (Dean Allen Williams). It’s a bucolic life, and despite some gentle ribbing between the kids, everything is hunky dory.
The family has been here for five months, but, one week before they intend to move back to New Mexico, Charlie gets a call that he’s being offered an on-air job in New York City. At the same time, Katie gets abducted by a mysterious neighbor (Hayat Kamille), who lures her in with her favorite chocolates. A frantic search through a sandstorm ensues, but Charlie loses her, and an indifferent Egyptian police unit suggests Charlie is responsible.
The film then jumps eight years, with the Cannon family now back in Albuquerque (unclear what happened to that sparkly job offer), settled into a life without their daughter. In her place is Maud (Billie Roy), and the now 17-year-old Sebastián (Shylo Molina). They live with Larissa’s kooky and hyper-religious Catholic mother Carmen (Veronica Falcón, quietly the film’s biggest breath of fresh air) who is never not praying.
If the film is meant to be some kind of meditation on grief and guilt, it barely manages to be so. Larissa and Charlie’s relationship doesn’t seem all that fractured. Until, that is, they get word from Cairo that Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) has been found, mummified, yet alive, inside a massive sarcophagus with the mystery of the infamous black slab of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Despite some obvious physical scarring and a seeming predilection for contorting her body in creepy ways, Katie seems pretty healthy, or so the Egyptian doctors tell her parents. So they bring her home to New Mexico, where her behavior only gets stranger, and gross stuff starts to happen. One of the harder plot points that Cronin has trouble selling is why the obviously traumatized young girl isn’t being kept under constant medical attention. Instead, she lays in bed, wheezing constantly, and sometimes lashing out or eating bugs.
The Mummy is set up with the grace of Boris Karloff lumping around the catacombs. It takes an interminable amount of time for the film to find its footing, and by the time it does it has exhausted its patience. Cronin tries to set up his film as both a body possession horror in the realm of The Exorcist and as a smoke-and-mirrors mystery akin to Se7en — there is an entire subplot following Detective Zaki (May Calamawy) that is both tedious and mostly unnecessary — but in the process none of lands all that effectively.
It’s an odd mix of approach, and, despite its considerable length, the film cannot service its disparate threads. Cronin takes considerable time setting up elements that are never fulfilled, including, most notably, the involvement of an archaeology professor (Mark Mitchinson) who is able to offer pertinent insight only to never be seen from again.
Most damning may be that the film is just not very scary. It is appreciably nasty, with bouts of peeling skin and mangled toenails and pools upon pools of vomit leading the way. The final act does more to demonstrate the rot of the family unit — in not dissimilar ways to Cronin’s previous work — than the previous two hours and change. But it would’ve been nice if that narrative work and characterization was more readily visible. Instead, too much of the film is hidden away behind layer upon layer of mummification.
Title: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
Distributor: Warner Bros/New Line Cinema
Release date: April 17, 2026
Director-screenwriter: Lee Cronin
Cast: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Veronica Falcón
Rating: R
Running time: 2 hr 14 mins
English (US) ·