Welcome to Crosstalk, wherein A.V. Club writers discuss their varied (or unvaried, as the case may be) perspectives on a pop-culture topic. This time, Jacob Oller and Monica Castillo unwrap the bindings of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy to see what dark fate awaits them.
Jacob Oller: Monica, first off, very excited you’re with us at The A.V. Club. Since you’re in New York and I’m in Chicago, we don’t get to go to screenings together, but we still get to watch the big new releases each week at around the same time, which means we can chat about them even if we’re not reviewing them ourselves. Which brings me to the big new studio horror: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which is a ridiculous title for a couple of reasons. One, Lee Cronin has only made one movie the general public’s heard of; two, this isn’t even really a mummy movie! There’s of course some gnarly, Sam Raimi-aping stuff in the new movie from the guy who made Evil Dead Rise, but vast swaths of this 133-minute film (why is it over two hours?) felt like the extended edition of some random Blumhouse possession film. Did you feel the same way? What was your general read on the film?
Monica Castillo: Always happy to talk about movies with you, Jacob, even when they’re bad—and this one was worse than I feared. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy looks as if they stuffed The Exorcist into a mummy costume just to put it under a different franchise. What do you mean the mummy takes over a little girl’s body? Why are prayers to a deity that existed thousands of years after this ancient civilization working on this mummy? I left with a lot more questions than this movie probably deserves. You’re right about the Sam Raimi nods, including using a rosary to mimic the Evil Dead tree scene, but this felt closer to John Boorman’s The Exorcist II: The Heretic in its bloated cross-cultural story, but without any of Boorman’s visual panache.
JO: I was going to say, the most mummy-like thing about the movie is its exoticization of Egyptians. So much lore, the back-and-forth between May Calamawy’s Cairo detective and the family, all to effectively just replace an exorcist with a random Egyptian woman who flew across the world in about an hour and a half. I was surprised how Exorcist-like this ended up being simply because the opening scene made me think we’d actually spend some time with modern Egypt. I know you also recently rewatched the original 1932 Universal Mummy with Boris Karloff, which is a surprisingly mannered and romantic film—that also happens to have more startling makeup effects than this 2026 film. Sure, you’re never going to beat Karloff’s eyes, but poor Katie, the girl who gets kinda-mummified and then haunts her family’s home, just got more and more like a CGI blob as the film went on. What’d you think of her as a monster?
MC: Weird that after almost 100 years after the original Mummy, Hollywood can’t seem to figure out how not to exoticize Egyptians in this story. This feels especially egregious here since it’s set in or near the present day. Also, my goodness did they travel a lot between Cairo and Albuquerque. I felt terrible for Calamawy’s character. She’s totally on call for this family, so I guess her other cases must wait. There’s a weird, sacrificial quality to her story that never felt right.
I actually really enjoyed revisiting the 1932 Mummy. Remember when they lit a set so that the audience could see what was happening? What a time. The director Karl Freund was the cinematographer on Metropolis and Dracula, so he knew how to shoot a movie. But what is a monster movie without its monster? Karloff’s second famous movie monster (after Frankenstein) was only under wraps for a few short scenes before reappearing in less restrictive makeup, letting his eyes bore into the souls of the audience and menacing the other characters with his imposing presence. Poor Katie indeed. The actress playing her, Natalie Grace, remained entombed behind CGI effects. Maybe it was the lighting or different angles, but at times, it looked like her face shape kept moving or growing bigger or smaller depending on the scene. Her movement was restricted, unless whenever she got loose, she would scamper off like Gollum. It wasn’t threatening, it was goofy.
JO: Actually seeing things in movies isn’t scary, you know? Trying to find a still image from Lee Cronin’s movie for this very piece was like staring at a mudslide. It’s amazing that Cairo and Albuquerque are the exact same shade of bland taupe (maybe that’s the connection—sister cities on the desert-coded color wheel). I know Katie was supposed to look desiccated and busted, but the indecision around how her body worked (she’s atrophied and weak until, like you said, she’s on all fours like every other cinematic possession victim of the last 15 years) was frustrating when it was meant to be unsettling. And yeah, her face was mostly just a morphing lump of dough. At least there were some gross moments with her toenails.
This leads me to my next question for you: Have you seen Cronin’s other films? I’d seen his Evil Dead and I checked out The Hole In The Ground ahead of this, and I still feel like I don’t have a great sense of him as a filmmaker, but I have a good sense of the things he finds scary: teeth, secretly evil family members, older women. He’s not got much of a style of his own, but at least his subconscious is consistent.
MC: This Mummy was my first Cronin film, and I’m not impressed. I watched a little of Evil Dead Rise before bed, and much of the movie looked so dark, I nodded off and forgot the TV was still on until there was a jump scare. He does enjoy his juicy horror though, so I give him some credit for making viewers cringe and grimace through scenes like the toenail clipping. I’d also say he leans into the shock factor of having an evil family member crossing some sort of familial boundary—which again feels more like the traits of a demonic possession than a mummified entity, but here we are. In Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, there’s an especially gross scene where Katie licks another family member’s toes and later, she asks her brother to come help her undress (she means peeling off her bandages, but what a line of dialogue). It’s not necessarily scary, but it’s pretty weird.
JO: Definitely weird, and something that harkens back to those familiar, transgressive possession tropes. When the youngest child started cursing up a storm at school, it felt like someone was owed royalties. But as you said earlier, despite some of these sillier images (the enjoyably gross tongue, the AI-looking CG wolves, an admittedly funny denture sequence, and the constant split diopter shots), there’s not a lasting or consistent visual boldness here to bridge the gap between tones of funny-gross and scary…not to mention it being way too long to sustain that kind of gonzo splatter energy. It seemed like they reverse-engineered a mummy movie out of some unrelated script, sort of like what they did with the third Die Hard movie. Any final thoughts on this barely Mummy movie?
MC: So many silly images for an allegedly scary movie! Not only did the wolves look downloaded from a PC game in the early aughts, it felt like the filmmakers lifted the pack and some neck nibbling from Dracula. We even get a slowed down version of “The Weight,” after a character falls to her death so we know we’re supposed to feel haunted. As if the preceding two hours wasn’t enough of a slog, then the movie didn’t know how to end, and kept going well past its expiration date. It was a punishing end for a movie that already wasn’t sustaining its suspense.
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