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Lee Cronin's The Mummy rises from its sarcophagus to curse those expecting quality

A numbing succession of schematic set pieces empties the canopic jars, then runs out of ideas.

By Simon Abrams  |  April 16, 2026 | 9:00am
Photo: Warner Bros.
Film Reviews The Mummy
Lee Cronin's The Mummy rises from its sarcophagus to curse those expecting quality

Anyone seeing ads for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a rare studio-distributed creature feature, might reasonably ask themselves, “Who’s Lee Cronin?” Some genre fans already know the guy’s work, but only if they’re invested in the Evil Dead franchise—Cronin wrote and directed the grisly but middling Evil Dead Rises—or contemporary Irish horror (Cronin’s relatively pared-down The Hole In The Ground remains good and eerie). That said, if Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is like any of the director’s previous work, it’s most like Evil Dead Rises, since it’s also programmatically upsetting yet narratively threadbare to the point of distraction. And while this movie’s relentless, reflex-testing shock scares suggest that the filmmaker has a sense of humor, the audience is never really encouraged to laugh along with them. Those looking for the next Sam Raimi will have to squint hard at The Mummy to see more than a passing resemblance to the Deadite King’s influence.

Cronin plays the hits throughout this schematic possessed-kid flick, which mainly follows a pair of worried parents, Larissa and Charlie (Laia Costa and Jack Raynor), and their hapless children, Maud and Seb (Billie Roy and Shylo Molina), as they struggle to figure out what happened to eldest child Katie (Natalie Grace), who went missing eight years ago in Egypt. Like a heavy cover band that leans too hard on power chords and stomping guitar hero theatrics, Cronin panders to the already-initiated by giving us way too much of what we came to see and not nearly enough dramatic context or mood-setting atmosphere to care about it. The audience therefore never gets to luxuriate in the movie’s wealth of bad taste, but rather is overpowered by it for a numbing 135 minutes.

Katie’s body eventually turns up in a black sarcophagus near the Eastern Desert. Years of physical neglect have reduced her to an almost catatonic state resembling locked-in syndrome, so Katie can’t really communicate or get around on her own. She also looks like a nightmare, from her necrotic, molting skin and drooping facial muscles to her long, brittle finger nails. 

Her dad, Charlie, is joined by Egyptian police Detective Zaki (May Calamawy) in being generically haunted, but otherwise meaninglessly driven to solve the mystery of Katie’s disappearance. “I can’t live without knowing what happened to her,” Charlie says. Sometimes Larissa joins their quest for answers, while other times she and the kids disappear for long stretches and only turn back up when Katie—or whatever evil spirit’s controlling her—feels like terrorizing the family.

You never really have to wait long for some supernatural shenanigans to pop off in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, though it’s often hard to know why they matter. Admittedly, it’s sometimes fun to watch Cronin and his collaborators put their characters through a surreal gauntlet of icky practical and computer-generated effects, but it’s also hard to care that much considering the average length of most set pieces, their arrhythmic pacing, and their overdetermined violence. 

It’s bad enough that Laurie and Charlie usually feel like afterthoughts in a story that’s ostensibly about their parental powerlessness. But what really sinks Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is its creators’ heedless insistence on flooding viewers with the ridiculous, logic-frying plot twists. If that’s the approach, you have to disarm viewers so completely that they accept your movie’s nightmare logic without reservations and never stop to wonder about whatever you have them gawking at. Some will likely come ready to enjoy the movie’s sheer too-much-ness. Everyone else will feel prodded and pressured into having a visceral response to every other scene, and to graphic content that eventually wears down into too much of the same thing, presented without enough variety or build-up to ever be genuinely unsettling.

To be fair, The Mummy‘s throbbing, heavily-foregrounded soundtrack might get under your skin anyway, especially whenever characters are listening to something loud and inexplicable happening in a nearby room, just out of view.  But for the most part, Cronin’s movie gracelessly piles on new ideas and images with each new scene, while never effectively building up to the next big jolt. Most of the movie’s standout moments have no real momentum and are visually dull to boot—but hey, there’s plenty of blood, pus, and barf.

Eventually, it becomes clear that Cronin only really wants to needle his audience, whether it’s through a heap of split diopter shots or obnoxiously loud song cues, like when they play “Blinded By The Light” right after Katie wakes up screaming from her years-long slumber. A good cover band can really hit the spot, but not when the band’s only mastered one emotional register and keeps playing that way for a longer-than-average set. It’s this tonal blandness that’ll lead to even the most forgiving gorehounds finding their patience tested by Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.

Director: Lee Cronin
Writer: Lee Cronin
Starring: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Verónica Falcón
Release Date: April 17, 2026

 
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