Warner Bros.
Three years on from his addition to the Evil Dead franchise, Irish filmmaker Lee Cronin takes on another horror icon with his take on the classic tale of The Mummy.
Gravitating away from the formula most people are familiar with from the Boris Karloff version and, subsequently, the Brendan Fraser version of the Egyptian tale of terror, Cronin’s version instead concerns his trademark angle of a family unit facing a supernatural ordeal that threatens to destroy them.
While living and working in Egypt, Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa) sees their world turned upside down when their daughter Katie is abducted by a mysterious woman who seemingly vanishes without a trace.
With the local authorities suspicious of Nick and unwilling to help, the family begrudgingly leaves Egypt for Arizona where they go about their lives.
Eight years later, they suddenly receive the news they thought they would never receive – Katie has been found. Alive.
Equally elated and shocked, the family soon moves Katie in with them, but there is something wrong with her that goes well beyond any of the trauma expected from such an ordeal, and it soon becomes clear that trauma is indeed not the only thing Katie is carrying.
As is par for the course for Cronin, the themes of family and trauma are present once again, just as he is more than happy to gross out his audience with a number of increasingly unhinged set pieces and gags, which are once again executed with a gleeful commitment to being abundantly gooey and gory.
The performances run the whole gamut from Reynor and Costa putting the effort in to convey parents trying to navigate a grief that offers no resolution to possessed kids being almost farcically evil, not to mention Natalie Grace’s harrowing physicality as she embodies Katie is also impressive.
Clocking in at 135 minutes, The Mummy is a bit long in the tooth, however, and while Cronin’s vision for the film is clear in spite of the bloated runtime, the filmmaker wanting to underline the crumbling family dynamic and how it escalates when the horror is introduced into the mix, the film could easily have been trimmed to create a tighter and more intense experience overall, as The Mummy ultimately becomes less streamlined than what he achieved with Evil Dead Rise.
Where Evil Dead Rise effortlessly segued from melodrama into gory horror territory, The Mummy makes this transition somewhat less smoothly, resulting in the film feeling more like two halves, which is not least due to the pacing, but also due to variations in tone being a little too at odds as the emotional darkness of the trauma makes a slightly too stark juxtaposition to the fun Cronin has with unleashing the gore as the narrative escalates.
While it will not be remembered as the best horror film of 2026, and many horror fans may find the narrative to deviate a little too far from what one would expect from a mummy film, the fresh angle on the curse of the mummy is nonetheless a welcome one, and Cronin once again proves that he has earned his place in contemporary horror, but it would also be great to see him apply new themes and structures in his upcoming features.
Extras include commentary, featurettes, and deleted scenes.
Verdict: 6 out of 10.
