For nearly a century, the cinematic mummy has wandered between two distant creative extremes: the solemn, shadowy gothic dread pioneered by classic Universal monster features, and the buoyant, swaggering pulp adventures that defined late-nineties popcorn entertainment. After an ill-fated attempt nearly a decade ago to refashion the creature into an explosive, star-powered superhero-adjacent spectacle, the property appeared destined for deep storage inside cinematic vaults. Enter filmmaker Lee Cronin. Fresh off rejuvenating suburban carnage with sheer unhinged malice, Cronin approaches the sarcophagus not with an archaeologist’s reverence or a stunt coordinator’s swagger, but with an embalmer’s scalpel. In Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, the ancient sand-covered icon is decisively dragged out of museum vaults and forced into the living room as a festering, traumatic instrument of pure domestic terror.
The film wastes very little time establishing its stark, unforgiving tone. We begin in Cairo, where broadcast journalist Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) resides with his family. Preoccupied with high-stakes career ambitions and television broadcasts, Charlie is physically present yet emotionally distant, leaving his observant, sweet-natured young daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) vulnerable in an environment far larger and more dangerous than she understands. When a deceitful local sorceress snatches Katie from the edge of her garden, the family’s world shatters instantly. Rather than chronicling the frantic search, Cronin makes an audacious narrative leap, fast-forwarding eight agonized years into the future.
The Cannons have since relocated across the globe, settling into a sun-bleached, hollow sanctuary in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Charlie and his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) share this roof alongside their sullen teenage son Sebastián (Shylo Molina), an eight-year-old daughter named Maud (Billie Roy) who serves as a living, breathing ghost of the child they lost, and Larissa’s devout, sharp-tongued mother Carmen (Verónica Falcón). This house is not so much a home as it is a mausoleum dedicated to unresolved despair. Katie’s untouched bedroom stands perfectly preserved like an open wound, an eerie monument to parental denial.
The narrative catalyst ignites when Charlie receives an impossible telephone call from Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), an indefatigable Cairo investigator who never abandoned the trail. Katie has resurfaced inside an excavated, three-millennium-old sarcophagus. Yet, the person returned to them is no longer an innocent suburban youth. Now portrayed by Natalie Grace in an unnervingly committed performance, the teenage Katie arrives back in America in an emaciated, near-catatonic state. Her skin has the brittle, cracked texture of ancient parchment, her vocal cords produce wheezing guttural raspings, and her overgrown, yellowed nails suggest decades of burrowing against granite. Driven by an all-consuming need to repair what was broken, Larissa insists on home care, utterly convinced that maternal tenderness can heal whatever rot has settled into her daughter’s bones.
What follows is an agonizing escalation of domestic horror that feels considerably closer to William Friedkin’s The Exorcist or Cronin’s own cabin-bound pedigree than any archeological expedition featuring crumbling tombs. The true evil here is not an ambulatory corpse wandering through hallways wrapped in frayed linen; it is an ancient, demonic Egyptian entity known as the Nasmaranian, weaponizing a shattered child’s physical shell to psychologically and anatomically dismantle a grieving household from the inside out.
From an aesthetic standpoint, the picture excels when it leans into unapologetic, tactile unpleasantness. Director of photography Dave Garbett bathes the Southwestern architecture in sickly, sepia tones that visually rhyme with the scorching sands of the Middle East, seamlessly blending exterior landscapes shot in Spain and Ireland. Cronin demonstrates an almost fetishistic obsession with tactile physical disgust: thick, tar-black vomit, peeling dermis, snapping bones, and an excruciating dinner-table moment featuring dental trauma that is guaranteed to test the fortitude of even hardened horror aficionados. There is a perverse ingenuity in how everyday domestic implements—from everyday bathroom clippers to ordinary kitchen tools—are repurposed into instruments of stomach-churning dread.
Where the production stumbles, preventing it from attaining true genre mastery, is its uneven narrative scaffolding. Clocking in at over two hours and ten minutes, the screenplay dilutes its claustrophobic domestic intensity by cutting across continents to Detective Zaki’s procedural investigation in Egypt. While Calamawy injects fierce gravity into her scenes and the glimpses into obscure Mesopotamian and Egyptian demonology are intellectually fascinating, these investigative beats constantly disrupt the family’s psychological spiral. Every time the tension within the Albuquerque residence reaches an unbearable boiling point, the camera darts away to decipher crumbling hieroglyphic scripts or academic lectures, momentarily deflating the room’s oxygen.
Furthermore, the characterization occasionally relies on the maddeningly oblivious behavior endemic to modern supernatural thrillers. The Cannon parents rationalize jaw-dropping, blatantly supernatural anomalies—such as mutilated wildlife, levitating apparatuses, and bizarre structural desecrations—with an obstinate denial that borders on narrative convenience. The emotional core of parental grief is palpably outlined by both Reynor and Costa, yet the script frequently favors shocking the audience rather than probing the bottomless emotional despair of having one’s dearest wish granted in the form of a living curse.
Nevertheless, when Cronin allows himself to cast aside procedural explanations and unleash pure theatrical chaos, the film roars into life. The climactic third act is a relentless, sensory assault of splattering fluids, inverted limbs, and dark, mordant humor that rewards patient moviegoers. Natalie Grace delivers an extraordinarily demanding physical performance, contorting between heartbreaking frailty and malicious ancient malevolence with terrifying agility.
Ultimately, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a fascinating, brutally entertaining genre hybrid. It refuses to flatter legacy expectations, firmly discarding romantic desert adventure in favor of bruising, uncompromised body horror. While burdened by pacing hiccups and a procedural subplot that occasionally overexplains what ought to remain shrouded in myth, its technical craftsmanship, stellar sound design, and relentless commitment to grotesque practical effects make it a daring and memorable entry in modern horror cinema. It successfully reclaims the ancient monster from blockbuster irrelevance, proving that some sarcophagi are far more terrifying when dragged right into our living rooms.
CINEMA SPICE RATING: ★★★½ (3.5/5)
