Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026)
The scariest thing about director Lee Cronin's new take on The Mummy franchise, aptly titled Lee Cronin's The Mummy, is not its entombed antagonist or parade of gross-out effects; it's the film's inflated runtime.
Clocking in at over two hours, this supernatural chiller might provoke a spookily unexpected thought, "God, I miss the Brendan Fraser version."
It's a shame, because Lee Cronin's The
Mummy has a solid director in Cronin, plus a promising set-up. The film
plays like a modern reincarnation of 1973's The Exorcist. In this
version, an American couple, TV reporter Jack (Charlie Cannon) and nurse
Larissa (Laia Costa), are living in Egypt with their two kids, Katie and
Sebastián, when eldest-daughter Katie is kidnapped. Eight years later, Katie
(now played by Natalie Grace) is discovered alive in Egypt, mummified in an
ancient sarcophagus. Reunited with her family, who are now living in
Albuquerque, NM, Katie proves a dark and troubling presence in their home,
especially for grandmother Carmen (Verónica Falcón) and new addition to the
family, and youngest daughter, Maud (Billie Roy). It is up to the parents, plus
Egyptian detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), to uncover, as the film's
marketing poses, "What happened to Katie?", as well as how to help her and/or
stop her.
If this all sounds intriguing enough, the film's runtime and tonal swings nearly squash any fun there is to be had. Cronin, director of 2023's squishy, squirm-inducing Evil Dead Rise, has a penchant for gross-out set pieces that push body horror to hair-rising, hilarious extremes.
Evil Dead Rise piled scene upon scene of wild body horror on top of each other with such volume and velocity that the film took on an artfully antic tone. Lee Cronin's The Mummy, by contrast, has long stretches of dead air and self-seriousness punctuated by moments of extreme "ew," making for a jarring, sometimes irritating viewing experience.
Katie, for her part, makes for a rather underwhelming screen antagonist. If you've seen the original The Exorcist, you've seen the sweet-girl-turned-demonic-vessel part played more effectively.
The film's noisy conclusion, which involves
sandstorms, scarab beetles, and bodily mutilation, prompted more guffaws and
muffled laughter in this critic's audience than shrieks—not a good sign for a
horror movie mostly playing it straight.
