The new Mummy arrives with the weight of a long cinematic lineage, and Lee Cronin approaches it with a craftsman’s appetite for rot, ritual, and domestic fracture. His film opens on a family already fraying, then deepens that rupture through a story of abduction, resurrection, and a curse that refuses to stay buried. The premise carries the familiar warning about disturbing the past, yet Cronin’s interest lies in how that disturbance reshapes the present, how a household becomes a fault line once an ancient force takes root.
Jack Reynor anchors the film as Charlie Cannon, a journalist whose confidence erodes under the strain of his daughter’s return. Cronin gives Reynor a role built on exhaustion and dread, and Reynor meets it with a performance that grows more haunted as the film advances. His scenes with Laia Costa’s Larissa form the emotional core, even when the script strains to balance their grief with the escalating supernatural spectacle. Their dynamic never settles, which becomes part of the film’s tension and part of its unevenness.
Cronin’s direction thrives on physical detail. Katie’s mummified body, rendered through Arjen Tuiten’s practical effects, becomes a living archive of torment and scripture. The peeling bandages, the cracked skin, the slow reveal of the demon’s inscriptions—these moments carry a tactile charge that the film returns to whenever its mythology grows unwieldy. Cronin trusts the body to tell the story, and the body delivers.
The film’s strongest passages emerge when Cronin leans into procedural dread. May Calamawy’s Detective Dalia Zaki brings a grounded intelligence to the chaos, tracing the kidnapping across continents and uncovering the ritual that bound the Nazarenian demon to Katie. Her investigation gives the film a spine, and her late arrival in New Mexico injects a clarity the narrative sorely needs. Calamawy’s presence steadies the film each time it threatens to collapse under its own lore.
Cronin’s taste for grotesquerie remains intact. A botched toenail trim becomes a small eruption of horror. A patch of slime under a rug pulses with quiet menace. A funeral scene turns into a desecration that pushes the film toward delirium. These sequences show Cronin at his most confident, orchestrating shocks that feel earned rather than obligatory. They also reveal the film’s tonal ambition: a blend of domestic tragedy and creature-feature exuberance.
Yet the film falters when it tries to stretch its mythology across too many threads. The VHS tape explaining the original ritual, the desert nectarine farm, the Magician’s lineage, the transcontinental chase—each element has potential, but the accumulation dulls the impact. Cronin’s instinct to expand the world sometimes works against the intimacy that makes the early scenes so gripping. The climax, crowded with close-ups and frantic cuts, loses the clarity that defines the film’s best moments.
Still, the emotional stakes remain potent. The family’s refusal to seek medical help, Carmen’s fervent prayers, Sebastián’s hypnotized obedience, Maud’s trance-bound violence—each moment underscores the film’s central fear: that love can blind, bind, and endanger. Cronin understands that horror thrives when the supernatural amplifies the human, and he returns to that truth even when the plot grows tangled.
Reynor’s final sacrifice gives the film its most resonant beat. The transfer ritual, the coffin-like box, the Morse code message tapped through the wood—these details form a quiet counterpoint to the film’s louder terrors. The ending, which sends Larissa and Dalia back to Cairo with a fully possessed Charlie, suggests a cycle that refuses to close. Cronin leaves the door open, not for a sequel, but for the lingering dread of unfinished business.
In the end, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy becomes a story about inheritance—of curses, of guilt, of the burdens parents carry for their children. It stumbles in its world-building, yet it holds fast to the emotional pressure that drives its best scenes. Cronin may not reinvent the mummy myth, but he gives it a pulse, a family, and a sense of consequence that stays with you after the dust settles.
Letter Grade: B+.
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