Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Review: Gnarly Horror Movie Makes A Classic Monster Scary Again

It’s hard to do something original with mummies. Based as they are on a real Ancient Egyptian cultural practice, they are defined by certain iconography and characteristics, and straying from them risks diluting their identity. Change too much, and it could feel like another monster entirely – after all, without the wraps and sarcophagus, how much really separates a mummy from the many other undead creatures out there?

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is determined to try anyway. Writer-director Lee Cronin holds onto the essential mythology while bringing in elements from a host of other influences, including the Evil Dead series, The Exorcist, and Hereditary, to try and shake up what mummies can be on screen. Discovering the true nature of this film’s mummy, and what it’s capable of, is part of the fun. The result isn’t quite a 28 Days Later moment – one way to understand the film’s full title is that this feels like one filmmaker’s interpretation of a classic monster, rather than a new template for others to follow – but it’s definitely the scariest a mummy movie has been in years.

The monster is also just one piece of an engaging, well-made film. Cronin threads the needle on a tricky mix of tones for much of The Mummy‘s runtime, shifting neatly from suspense to genuine fear to gross-out laughter and back again. The narrative is shallower than you’d want, but until it’s all actually wrapping up, you’ll likely be too focused on the style and set pieces to notice. It’s another clear win for studio horror in 2026, and for the right audience, a really fun time at the movies.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Is At Its Best When Building Anticipation

The Mummy has a pretty simple premise: Eight years after their daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) went missing while they lived in Egypt, Americans Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa) learn that she’s been found alive (Natalie Grace), but in frighteningly bad shape. She was discovered in a sarcophagus, wrapped in strips of cloth covered with ancient script, with badly damaged skin and in a severe state of distress. The couple bring their daughter home to Albuquerque, New Mexico, joining her two younger siblings Sebastián (Shylo Molina) and Maud (Billie Roy) and grandmother Carmen (Verónica Falcón), to hopefully recover from her injuries and trauma. Instead, bad things start happening.

The trailers make it seem like nothing is known about what happened to Katie, but interestingly enough, the film doesn’t work this way. Cronin is in no rush to get to the meat of his setup. We’re introduced to the family before her abduction, as well to her abductors, and the smart, efficient script finds the right shorthand to establish the dynamics at play. We’re given a hint as to why Katie is taken, but more importantly, we experience how she’s taken, both from her perspective and from her frantic father’s. The film wants us to experience the horror of what’s happening to this girl and her parents as more than just a mystery, and everything that comes next has much greater weight because of it.

Cronin excels at building fearful anticipation, and for a while, it seems like all of The Mummy might have this intensity. The film often pairs something gruesome with a character reacting to it, whether through editing or split diopter shots. The repetition of certain sounds, from the whine of a camera flash charging to the rhythmic chattering of Katie’s teeth, very effectively triggers our stress response as scenes approach a scare. In these moments, you can feel the director using everything at his disposal to shape our emotional responses, to the extent that he earns having his name in the movie’s official title.

Of the characters, May Calamawy‘s Detective Zaki, who eventually runs Missing Persons for the Cairo Police, is the most associated with this grounded tone, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that her performance makes the strongest impression. Her character doesn’t have much time to be developed, but through physicality alone, she reads as competent, driven, and a touch haunted from the moment she’s on-screen. She gets a wonderfully suspenseful sequence late in the movie, following up on a major lead in Katie’s case, that is as good an audition for her own season of True Detective as I’ve seen.

Though Stylish & Rich In Ideas, The Mummy Could’ve Used A More Layered Story

The rest of the film moves in slightly different directions. Once Katie is home, and the nature of her condition is made apparent, The Mummy attempts to toe a tricky line. Some moments clearly channel The Exorcist by grounding us in the horror of a parent witnessing the corruption of their child; Katie is prone to sudden bursts of self-harm if not heavily sedated. Others, however, recall Cronin’s previous film, Evil Dead Rise, both in their absurd gore and wicked sense of humor. Overall, the film handles the mixture nicely, but they aren’t entirely compatible registers. Once the wince-and-laughs start, the opportunities to be truly afraid become fewer and further between.

The latter film and this one are compellingly intertwined. In both, Cronin mines anxieties around analog technology, bringing back creepy audio recordings and adding a creepy videotape to this one. But most prominently, both movies are about the profound defilement of the family. In Evil Dead Rise, a mother is weaponized against her children; in The Mummy, a child is weaponized against her parents. The degree to which this new movie is organized around the concept of family is a source of real strength, thematically as well as emotionally.

What doesn’t work as well, and hurts the finale, is the mystery element. The film adeptly handles the uneasy feeling of the unknown around Katie’s abduction, but that also creates a sense that there will be more to uncover than there ultimately is. When The Mummy charges into its all-hell-unleashed ending after revealing there isn’t more to the story than what I’d put together an hour ago, I couldn’t avoid feeling a tinge of disappointment. It does, I think, result in this movie being a somewhat lesser experience in memory than it felt in the room.

Still, even if I wish Cronin had pursued less of the gross-out fun and more of the skin-crawling horror to close things out, The Mummy is a film I can happily recommend. At its best, it’s a great, gripping horror movie, filled with memorable characters whose visceral pain will make you squirm in your seat. That level of craft is always worth seeking out on the big screen and experiencing with a packed audience.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy releases in theaters nationwide on Friday, April 17.

Release Date

April 17, 2026

Runtime

136 Minutes

Director

Lee Cronin

Writers

Lee Cronin

Producers

Jason Blum, James Wan, John Keville

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