Lee Cronin's The Mummy Review (Film, 2026)

content warning: blood, gore, violence against women, violence against children, animal abuse, foul language, child endangerment, grieving, surgical/hospital footage

The concept of the mummy in American horror films is a complicated history of cultural identity, racism, and much-needed discussions on who gets to tell what stories. That multiple series of Hollywood films in horror and action have been created around Ancient Egyptian cultural practices, vilifying the burial rights of significant figures within that culture for scares, is problematic; even more so when the contemporary Egyptians are complicit in and often the cause of the mummy coming back. So we steal their culture, we steal their artifacts, and we turn them into villains when corrupting their stories. Yuck. There's no way around it.

So color me surprised that Lee Cronin, the award-winning Irish writer/director behind The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise, is the next in a long line of directors to try their hand at a mummy film. Lee Cronin's The Mummy, titled as if Blumhouse is trying to point the blame at anyone else, actually tries to engage in this much-needed cultural conversation with a unique take on the nature of mummies.

The film opens in Egypt. A family is driving home with the mother (Hayat Kamille, the standout performer of the film) clearly irritated by everything going on. Her daughter discovers the family's pet bird is injured and brings her husband to the locked off area of the house to investigate. Their family is tasked with making sure a mummy buried far below their farm stays contained, and it looks like it's time for more action. The entire sequence is performed in Egyptian with subtitles, a welcome change from the long-history of thick broken accents in this genre.

Meanwhile, the Cannon Family from America are staying in Egypt while father Charlie works as a field reporter for a major news network. After an argument between siblings, daughter Katie goes outside to play in the garden, where she encounters the mother, calling herself The Magician. She's really good at making things disappear. Katie is abducted and the police believe the family had to have done it themselves.

Eight years later, after the world has all but forgotten about missing child Katie Cannon, the family receives the news that Katie was found locked inside a sarcophagus. She is experiencing locked-in syndrome, unable to communicate or control her own body voluntarily, but is otherwise totally healthy. Katie is released back to her family's care in the hope that she will return to normal.

That is a lot of exposition front-loaded in Lee Cronin's The Mummy, but it doesn't feel so "a goes to b goes to c" while watching. The film is filled with stylish camera work, making great use of split diopter lens photography to disorient the viewer and put the seemingly mummified Katie in focus no matter where she actually is in the room. The scares are intense, the violence is absolutely disgusting, and the score will haunt your nightmares (shout out to Sketching Details favorite Bambie Thug providing vocals to the orchestral score in a way only they could). Lee Cronin pulls no punches, even when it becomes clear that no one is safe from the ripple effect of The Magician's work.

The biggest problem with Lee Cronin's The Mummy is that ambition. There's the a-plot of the Cannon Family trying to deal with Katie's strange behavior; there's the b-plot of the investigator who initially suspected Charlie of doing something to Katie in Egypt investigating Katie's reappearance; there's the c-plot of Charlie and his wife Larissa drifting apart as the immense weight of responsibility caused by Katie's condition becomes apparent; and there's the d-plot of The Magician and her tricks in Egypt. Those are the main threads; there are enough dropped plot threads to make a whole quilt.

I am a critic of my word, so I do appreciate a beautiful and terrifying mess of extreme risk-taking in a horror film to a by-the-numbers mummy film, but there are limits to that generosity. Lee Cronin's The Mummy is a disgusting and terrifying ride through a unique angle on a mummy-centered film. Sure, it was yucky, but that's from bile, pus, and blood, not blatant racism. If you aren't good with gore and a whole lot of "don't go in there" moments, you might not enjoy the film as much as I did.

Lee Cronin's The Mummy is currently playing in theaters.