Lee Cronin's The Mummy Review: Director's Latest is Fun, But Reuses Its Best Bits to Death
It consistently reads like key ideas are excavated from a half-written Evil Dead script
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Lee Cronin’s The Hole in the Ground was a strong, moving feature about a mother who lives far too close to a sinkhole, and what happens when her son disappears only to return different… perhaps a changeling. It was a stellar outing, setting Cronin up to give his take on the world of Deadites and Necronomicons in Evil Dead Rise, this time with a mother endangering children thanks to Deadite possession.
In Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (which Brendan Fraser is not in), a family’s daughter gets possessed by an ancient Egyptian spirit, gradually endangering the family. Keep possessing spirits outta your kids, everyone!
It’s a fun scare-fest that’s made with strong technical precision, boasting a great performance from Natalie Grace, but it’s also full of overused tricks, under-used strengths, and unexplored avenues, making for an uneven horror yarn.
Journalist Charlie (Jack Reynor) is an American journalist living in Cairo when his daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell as young Katie, Grace as the elder) goes missing. The family suspects foul play, but are unable to find a detective who will take the investigation seriously.
Fast forward eight years and Katie is found… within a thousand year old sarcophagus. Katie’s changed: unresponsive, ill-kept, malnourished, and prone to spontaneous movements and sounds. The family, including her mother Larissa (Laia Costa), brother Sebastian (Shylo Molina), youngest sister Maud (Billie Roy), and grandmother Carmen (Verónica Falcón) enlist local Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) to try and uncover what happened to Katie… and then the terrors really start.
Natalie Grace, as the besieged young girl at the film’s heart, is excellent. She’s thoroughly eerie, whether being still in bed, teeth-chattering in the corner, or sprinting through the house. Reynor and Costa give solid performances as the emotionally charged parents, sometimes at odds in their attempts to understand a supernatural, emotional situation. Calamawy should have more screen time, but she delivers a nuanced and dedicated performance as Det. Zaki, while Verónica Falcón (also under-used) is a walking charisma bomb as the family’s religious matriarch.
There is evident technical prowess in the execution of the mummy. Dave Garbett’s skilled cinematography in close quarters looks great (split diopters for the win). The production design is gorgeous in some cases (that sarcophagus is awesome) and increasingly, perfectly ugly in others. Bryan Shaw’s edits have precision and move along at an effortless and breezy pace. On a technical level alone, it’s a confidently and competently made picture.
The setup is about as plausible as one could get to engineer a movie about mummies that doesn’t replicate the Universal franchises they’re trying to distance themselves from (Blumhouse’s social media campaign literally consisted of daily reminders that Brendan Fraser was not in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy). They do so by finding a way to sorta make a little girl a mummy (is it even a Lee Cronin film if it doesn’t have parents and children trapped together in a house with one party endangered by a supernatural force that’s inhabiting the other?), and they make it work, if a tad contrived.
The scares are predominantly effective, and it’s an overall entertaining movie with few moments that drag. It does, however, have some odd logical leaps and moments of convenient plotting. The film begins with Katie studying for some sort of Morse Code test, which she uses to give a key piece of communication about what’s going on to her father. Why does she know exactly what info to give? And how is she clearly taken over, body and soul, but somehow capable of that one physical communicative skill? There are severall convenient contrivances that contain even more unavoidable spoilers, but the film’s full of those elements in key narrative-advancing ways.
There are also a number of underdeveloped plot elements. One of the film’s most interesting is the relatively unique mythology they utilize, which they go into just enough to start being interesting before they stop interrogating further. Charlie consults a scholar on some spell-like markings he found, and Detective Zaki later finds confirming details of a ritual in her investigation, just enough to give more information on the entity endangering the family. But Charlie never goes back and investigates further to evolve the mythos. They genuinely forget that the professor character exists, which isn’t what a journalist like Charlie would likely do.
Cronin builds atmosphere and dread effectively as the parents feel out of their depth with what Katie’s going through (and unsure of what she’ll do next). There are enough surprises to keep audiences guessing. Where the film falters on the scare level is an overreliance on the gross of it all that ends up repeating the same techniques in exactly the same manner.
We get it, Katie comes back looking different from what happened to her. The crusty, old nails are gross! The self-mutilation is gross! All that’s fine enough, but when we’re hitting a second round of all these elements, then a third, fourth, fifth, it starts to feel like Cronin’s too reliant on the same bag of tricks. Moreover, this Mummy film feels a little too close in tone and entity behavior to Evil Dead’s Deadites. They like to shock, be gross, and gleefully malicious; that’s part of what the Deadites, as novel undead entities, are. But why would this entity act like a Deadite?
There’s a lot about The Mummy that works. It’s well made, great performance by Natalie Grace, cool mythology, and some truly scary moments. It’s fun! That said, there are also missed opportunities and underutilized strengths, and some plot threads should be further developed. It consistently reads like key ideas are excavated from a half-written Evil Dead script, and some techniques are used far, far, far too often without variation. It escapes being bad thanks to just enough elements that work, but it’s also transparently clear that another script pass would have done wonders.
Grade: D
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy heads to theaters April 17, 2026.
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