There’s a version of this new take on The Mummy that exists in the margins of Lee Cronin’s latest horror outing - a sharper, more emotionally devastating film about grief, guilt, and the impossible weight of losing a child. You can feel it in nearly every frame, lurking beneath the surface of what ultimately becomes a far messier, more uneven experience. And yet, even in its most frustrating stretches, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy proves difficult to dismiss. Cronin’s (Evil Dead Rise, The Hole in the Ground) instincts as a horror filmmaker thankfully remain as vicious and inspired as ever, even when the story around them struggles to keep up.
Produced by James Wan’s Atomic Monster as well Blumhouse Productions, the film opens with an effectively disarming sense of normalcy: a family road trip, kids singing, parents barely holding it together, the kind of lived-in chaos that feels instantly recognizable. That grounding pays off when the horror begins to creep in, first slowly, then with increasing cruelty. Cronin has always understood that violence hits harder when it disrupts something warm and familiar, and that’s very much the case here for this family nightmare. The early discovery of a dead bird through the eyes of a child sets the tone with a quiet kind of dread that lingers.
The setup is simple enough: Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa) are a married couple living in Cairo with their two children, Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastián (Dean Allen Williams). One terrible fateful day, Katie is kidnapped by a mysterious neighbor (Hayat Kamille), disappearing into the desert. It’s a genuinely upsetting inciting incident, made even more potent by how grounded it feels. This isn’t just supernatural horror, it’s the kind of all-too-real nightmare that could exist without it.
Where The Mummy begins to falter is in its structure. Cronin and his collaborators bounce between timelines and locations with an almost disorienting lack of rhythm. Eight years pass, the family relocates to New Mexico, and the emotional fallout of Katie’s disappearance hangs over everything, but the film never quite settles into a consistent flow. Instead, it feels like it’s constantly catching up to itself, stitching together pieces of a story that still doesn’t feel like it’s actually really begun.
That’s a shame, because there’s real substance here. Charlie, a journalist specializing in Egyptian culture, becomes our central figure, driven by equal parts guilt and obsession. His unraveling, both emotional and intellectual, is easily the most compelling thread in the film. Watching him chase answers, trying to make sense of what happened to his daughter and what she ultimately becomes, gives the film its strongest sense of momentum.
When Katie inevitably, mysteriously returns, the film finds its most haunting imagery. She’s not whole, not even close. Played with remarkable physicality by Natalie Grace, this new Katie is decayed, disfigured, and trapped somewhere between life and death. She embodies the film’s most potent idea: what if grief doesn’t let you mourn, but instead forces you to live with a constant, grotesque reminder of what you’ve lost? It’s an undeniably effective concept, and it’s one that (much like his previous film Evil Dead Rise) Cronin visualizes with a disturbing commitment to physical horror.
Once Katie is back in the house, The Mummy shifts into more familiar genre territory. The comparisons to The Exorcist aren’t just inevitable but practically invited. A possessed child, a desperate family, projectile vomit, creeping dread within the confines of a home; it’s all here, sometimes to a fault. Cronin layers in Egyptian mythology and mummy iconography, but structurally, the film often plays like a remix of well-worn possession tropes.
That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if the film consistently found ways to reinvent those beats. Sometimes it does. Katie roaming the house at night, her body contorting in unnatural ways, is deeply unsettling. There’s also a brief POV sequence from her perspective that adds a welcome layer of unease, suggesting something far more alien and unknowable beneath the surface.
But then there are moments where the film undercuts itself, particularly once Katie begins to speak. The shift toward more traditional “scary movie dialogue” strips away some of the raw, primal horror that makes her presence so effective early on. It’s here that the Evil Dead DNA in Cronin’s filmmaking becomes most apparent, for better and worse. The nastiness is intact, but the tone occasionally veers into something more akin to Deadite-esque explicitness that feels borrowed from other franchises, rather than something that feels its own.
In that regard, if there’s one thing Cronin undeniably nails, it’s the sheer brutality of his horror. When The Mummy decides to go for it, it really goes for it. The violence is mean, grotesque, and often genuinely shocking. There are sequences here (particularly in the back half) that feel like a natural escalation of gory depravity, pushing the film progressively further into uncomfortable territory to great effect.
A funeral sequence, in particular, stands out as one of the film’s most unhinged highlights, balancing emotional devastation with outright giddy terror in a way the rest of the film only occasionally achieves. The finale is exceptionally feral, as well. It’s the kind of extended, gooey, blood-soaked descent into chaos that almost makes you forget the film’s earlier shortcomings. Almost.
Because as thrilling as that third act is, it also underscores a frustrating truth: The Mummy works best when it stops trying to be a gloomy grief-stricken narrative and instead leans fully into Cronin’s strengths as a horror stylist.
For all its attempts to explore grief, the film never quite gives that theme the space it deserves. It’s there - in the strained marriage between Charlie and Larissa, in the unspoken blame surrounding Katie’s disappearance, in the way the family has basically shut down in the years since - but it often feels overshadowed by the mechanics of the plot.
That tension between emotional depth and genre spectacle defines much of the film. You can see what Cronin is reaching for, but the execution doesn’t always land. The pacing issues, the reliance on familiar tropes, and an epilogue that feels wholly unnecessary all contribute to a sense of a film that never fully realizes its potential.
Yet there’s something undeniably compelling about this version of The Mummy, even when it’s at its most uneven. Cronin fills the film with striking imagery; moments of pure horror that can make even the most hardened of horror veterans squirm in their seats. Katie herself is also a pretty memorable genre creation in her own right - a figure that’s equal parts tragic and terrifying.
So while the film can come across as a bit of a Frankenstein-like patch job, when it works, it really works. The third act alone is enough to win over anyone simply looking for a wild, visceral horror experience, and for gorehounds in particular, this is an absolute feast.
Ultimately, The Mummy feels like a film caught between two identities: a deeply personal story about the loss of a child and a full-throttle ooey gooey horror spectacle. It never quite reconciles those halves, but in the chaos of that struggle, Cronin still delivers enough unforgettable moments to make the bumby ride worthwhile.
‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ is now playing in theaters.
