A return to its horror roots with Lee Cronin’s The Mummy….
Anyone thinking that the 2026 version of the much filmed The Mummy story might be akin to the 1999 Brendan Fraser blockbuster is in for a shock. Coming from a writer-director whose oeuvre is horror, ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’, is anything but a bright and breezy blockbuster and is instead horror with a capital H.
This sees Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor looking like Chris Pratt’s twin) a journalist based in Cairo with his pregnant wife Larissa and their two young children Katie and Sebastian. All is well until Katie is abducted by a woman never to be seen again. With the Cairo Missing Persons Unit seemingly having trained at the same school of investigation as the Portugese officers who dealt with the Madeleine McCaan case it seems that Katie has gone forever. Fast forward eight years and Larissa has had her baby Maud and her devoutly catholic mother in law also lives with the family when they receive the call that Katie has been found. But when they go to the hospital she is no longer the fun loving ray of sunshine but clearly deeply traumatized by whatever the circumstances were of her abduction.
Katie now is withdrawn, uncommunicative with a disdainful stare occasionally shouting obscenities meaning that to most parents she is a normal teenager. But her appearance is not what they expected – no longer the clear eyed child instead she looks like that time when you asked for an Action Man for Christmas and your Dad has taken a hot spoon to your sister’s old Barbie doll . All is not well and Katie’s return has a wholly malign influence on the family as Cronin incrementally ramps up the horror.
This version of the legend plays as much as an mystery to be unravelled as it does a horror. Cronin has very much bought his horror aesthetic from his last film, ‘Evil Dead Rise’ and the gore quota steadily increases as the story infolds building to a gore soaked climactic last act.
It has been a very long time since we had a proper horror film built around the Mummy legend that was part of the classic Universal monsters that the studio tried to resurrect with their hoped for MonsterVerse franchise which started and collapsed with the catastrophic Tom Cruise 2017 film that was far more of an action film. Its warners who have taken up the mantle and with his name in the title ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ is horror through and through with the occasional nod to The Exorcist but is heavily indebted to an Evil Dead sensibility when it comes to the, ‘Ewww!’ factor – and his ‘cheese grater moment’ from Evil Dead Rise here is a toe clipping sequence.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy could be a shade tighter in plotting but it’s good to see a horror film that’s allowed to be a horror film having been granted an 18 certificate rather than diluted to a 15 certificate and its all the better for it.
related feature: An Egyptian Mummy attracts mysterious insects ……
related feature : ‘Evil Dead Rise’ director Lee Cronin talks horror, hidden Easter eggs and sequel ideas…
Here’s the trailer…..
