I was initially suspicious of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – does anyone care who Lee Cronin is, or his Mummy, and why should this film bear his name? It turns out there’s a good reason for the director’s name up top – no one involved wanted audiences thinking they were getting a continuation of either the Brendan Fraser-era The Mummy (1999), or the 2017 one, which was frankly rather a bizarre cinematic use of Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe, but there you go.
Those were in different ways action movies and this is most assuredly horror. Cronin you may know from Evil Dead Rise, which was an efficiently horrible kind of shocker with several obvious nods to The Exorcist. Cronin keeps that going here, with a story about an undead Egyptian mummy whose centuries-long sleep is disturbed by locals digging for water. Now needing a new flask for the old spirit – or is it a new spirit for the old flask, it’s not entirely clear – the mummy and his/her/its enablers kidnap the child of an American TV news journalist working in Egypt.
The child turns up, remarkably, some years down the line. In a shocking state, catatonic, with skin covered in what looks like hieroglyphs, the now-teenage Katie is taken home, where Cronin and crew get down to some serious Exorcist homage, while Jack Reynor and Laia Costa, as her parents, pull increasingly fraught shapes.
A possession and child-abduction movie rolled into one, with a dynamic of a family closing ranks to prevent a terrible secret getting out. It separates it entirely from mummy movies of yore, though in many respects Cronin is more faithful to the lore than many a mummy movie. He’s all in on authenticity – it’s hieratics, not hieroglyphs, we learn – and lavishes attention on wrappings and sarcophagi. There are even, sharp intake of breath, real Egyptians in this one, largely in the shape of the charismatic May Calamawy as Detective Zaki, an Egyptian cop who is initially involved in the child-abduction investigation and later becomes involved again when Katie’s demonic histrionics drive her parents to desperate measures.
Katie is a work of some genius, her face looking like it’s been melted, eyes all boggly, skin scrawled all over. She’s creepy even in catatonic repose, but once the demon in her wakes up and she starts doing things like eating live scorpions and projectile vomiting it all gets very yuk. Natalie Grace is put through it as young Katie, in a role that’s memorable, though she might be reluctant to use extracts on a showreel. She buffs up well in publicity pics FYI.
Cronin likes to serve his gore with a side order of ick – at one point Katie pulls out all her own teeth (the gore), then yanks the dentures from her grandmother’s mouth and inserts them in her own (the ick). He pulls variations on this regularly and if there is any real criticism to be made of this movie it’s that it works this trick a couple of times too many. Overall, it’s a wee bit long too.
And yet. Suspicion gave way to surprise because this is an incredibly effective horror movie that’s managed to re-invigorate an entire horror genre and make it creepy again. This is only Cronin’s third feature. I thought I’d seen The Hole in the Ground, his debut, but if I did I didn’t take any notes. The follow-up, Evil Dead Rise, was assured, committed, gory and inventive. This goes one better. Can Cronin top it?
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
