‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ review: Vile, derivative franchise resurrection is wrapped in borrowed bandages

There was a time when Brendan Fraser could sell you an entire myth with a shrug and a smirk, and the iconic Imhotep carried genuine melancholy behind that glorious shrieking carcass. Nearly thirty years on, those pulpy adventures have aged like fine embalming fluid with their sense of fun resisting decay even as Hollywood keeps returning to the tomb with increasingly heavy hands. After Tom Cruise’s ill-fated attempt to graft it into a cinematic universe already proved how quickly this material curdles when pushed into the wrong shape, this latest exhumation by Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin steps up fresh off the gory success of Evil Dead Rise with enough industry goodwill to attempt a revival and just enough hubris to slap his own name on the coffin.

This new iteration comes with heavy hitters behind it, including horror veterans James Wan and Blumhouse Productions, although the early chatter about Wan allegedly bristling at an early cut lingering in the air even after official denials attempted to smooth things over, and the finished product does little to dispel the idea that something went sideways along the way. Cronin relocates the myth into a contemporary frame that begins in Cairo, where Charlie Cannon, a TV journalist played by Jack Reynor, lives with his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and their children, until their daughter Katie vanishes in a sandstorm after befriending the wrong neighbour. Eight years later, the grief-stricken family is now settled in Albuquerque, where the child returns in the most absurd way possible — discovered inside a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus at a plane crash site and returned to her parents in a state that oscillates between catatonia and something far more sinister that would send any rational adult running in the opposite direction.

Cronin’s visual habits are all over the place in ways that feel both deliberate and oddly second-hand, with frequent split-diopter compositions constantly forcing foreground and background into the same anxious frame and a camera that prowls like it expects something to lunge at it, while the house itself becomes a kind of pressure chamber filled with tight corners, crawl spaces, and long sightlines that promise scares even when nothing is happening, which works for a while until inertia sets in.

Once Katie is back under the same roof, all common sense and survival instincts exit the building and the script starts relying on sheer stubbornness to keep things moving, as the Cannons decide, against all visible evidence, that the emaciated, wheezing, clearly possessed child in their care just needs “time and affection”. The choice flattens them into passengers in their own story and drains the film of any genuine stakes. As the runtime stretches well past the point of comfort, the pacing slackens into an endurance test, with scenes circling the same irritating beats while the narrative waits for the next outburst of violence to justify its length.

A still from ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’
| Photo Credit:
New Line Cinema

The performances offer intermittent relief from the slog, with newcomer Natalie Grace committing fully to Katie’s physicality, contorting her body into shapes that feel genuinely uncomfortable to watch and channeling the unfiltered menace of Linda Blair without sliding into imitation. Calamawy remains reliably grounded and gives the film a sense of purpose whenever it drifts too far into noise; Reynor, still carrying the residue of his ordeal in Midsommar, spends most of his time reacting to horrors he cannot influence, and the rest of the cast blends into the wallpaper. 

What Cronin never holds back on is the gore, and the film turns into a parade of increasingly grotesque assaults on the human body — from Katie methodically peeling away layers of her own decaying flesh with a disturbing calm, to endless eruptions of viscous blackened bile entering as many orifices up for grabs, as bodies are bent, broken, and emptied with a gleeful excess. And an incredibly disturbing late sequence involving a found-footage-style snuff film of Katie’s possession is also particularly disconcerting, recalling the sadistic voyeurism of 2023’s Red Rooms.

A still from ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’
| Photo Credit:
New Line Cinema

But for all that effort, the film never quite figures out why it exists beyond the gore-fest, and the central idea of the mummy feels strangely hollow, reduced to a variant of the Deadite template Cronin already explored in Evil Dead Rise; Katie’s creature design and behaviour also seems awfully reminiscent of the earlier 2013 remake of Evil Dead’s feral Mia. The decision to shift the bulk of the action to the American Southwest also drains the material of the cultural specificity that might have given it weight, leaving the glimpses of Egypt as the most evocative passages in a film that seems uncertain of its own identity. But the most baffling conceptual choice is how the film abandons standard mummy lore in favour of a demonic possession framework tied to the vaguely sketched Nasmaranian backstory that feels hideously misplaced within this mythos and would have worked more comfortably in a straight-faced riff on The Exorcist instead. 

If nothing else, Cronin may have finally done the one thing generations of archaeologists, adventurers, and studio executives failed to manage, wrapping this franchise so tightly in noise, goo, and second-hand ideas that it might finally stay buried out of sheer embarrassment. May God help the next poor soul tempted to pry this sarcophagus open.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is currently running in theatres