Review: ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ is the most disgusting studio horror film in recent memory
2026 / Dir. Lee Cronin
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: gross mummy stuff.
This ain’t your dad’s Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy, this is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy! Despite its pretentious-sounding title (likely to make sure audiences don’t confuse it with the planned Fraser sequel, and oh boy there’s definitely going to be someone who walks into this expecting a fun action adventure and getting mummies vomiting instead), Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is one of the most disgusting, repulsive horror films to come from a major studio in recent memory. And I mean that as a compliment.
Having nothing to do with any other previous mummy franchise other than some expected imagery like sandstorms, scarab beetles, and scorpions, The Mummy (forgive me, Lee Cronin, I’m dropping your name henceforth) follows a family recovering from the deep trauma of having their daughter kidnapped eight years prior while living in Egypt. Charlie Cannon (Jack Raynor, the terrible boyfriend in Midsommar) starts the film as a newscaster on assignment in Egypt, hoping to stop dragging his family around the globe and land a cushier morning show job in New York. That is, until his daughter is snatched by a woman with some sketchy mummy connections.
When we pick back up with the family, he and his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa, Victoria, Piercing), and their two other children are living with her mother (Verónica Falcónback, Ozark, Queen of the South) in New Mexico. They’re surviving, but the random hand that fate dealt them has frozen the family in time. That changes when Katie (newcomer Natalie Grace) is found… in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus wrapped in mummy bandages. When Charlie and Larissa go back to Cairo, they’re told they don’t know what happened to her, but they believe Katie is locked in her body due to the trauma that’s also caused many strange body tics and aggression. They’re told that if they take her back, she’ll snap out of it; they just need to make sure to keep her sedated. She also looks like a mummy.
Larissa is a professional nurse, which is why we’re supposed to think it makes any sense at all to bring Katie back to their home around their other kids when she’s really, really fucked up and scary as hell. The suspension of disbelief doesn’t really matter because very quickly it becomes clear that Lee Cronin followed up his Evil Dead Rise with a totally batshit, unofficial Evil Dead movie full of outrageous gore, putrid body fluids, and scene after scene of maximalist tension.
Produced by James Wan and Blumhouse, The Mummy certainly takes influence from the style of Insidious and The Conjuring through its tormented house setting, but with a huge injection of Sam Raimi and Brian De Palma. In particular, Cronin and cinematographer Dave Garbett (returning with Cronin from Evil Dead Rise) exploit the hell out of the split diopter shot where objects appear on both sides of the screen in a way that retains the look of shallow depth of field while keeping everything else in focus (it’ll be really easy to spot).
When Katie first gets home, there’s an incredible scene of the whole family in her bedroom surrounding the bed. Cronin balances out all these different conversations between several characters seen in the split diopter wide shot, cutting between them, shots of Katie’s abuelita’s distorted lips praying over Katie, and Katie’s increasing agitation until all hell breaks loose, set to the film’s punishingly loud and chaotic score from also frequent Cronin collaborator Stephen McKeon. This is just one of many genuinely scary and unsettling sequences in the film that pull no punches. When another horror movie would cut, The Mummy keeps going; the toenail scene, in particular, will make you second-guess trimming your nails for the rest of your life.
The horror sequences are the standouts here, but there’s more to the film than just gore and endless vomiting. Cronin’s films have all focused on the nightmarish experience of parenthood, and here it’s the failure to protect your child and the helplessness that comes after trauma. Connor, as a newscaster, wants to put Katie in a psychiatric facility, which Larissa is absolutely opposed to. Larissa wants to move forward, and Connor needs to solve the mystery of what happened to his daughter. I wished this had been explored more, yet it still strikes a nerve.
It’s also worth noting how The Mummy tries to avoid the cultural exoticism of its predecessors by featuring a prominent Arab-speaking cast. Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy (Ramy, Moon Knight) has a significant b-story as a detective trying to find out who took Katie and what happened to her.
All of this, unfortunately, has the side effect of a beefy 133-minute runtime, which makes it an unwanted endurance test in addition to all the grisliness. There’s a scene when Katie tries to “mingle” with a house full of guests that’s certainly bananas, but felt like it was going to be the beginning of the end bloodbath until it wasn’t, and the film went on another half hour. Then we get an ending that feels like it’s setting up a sequel or mid-credits sequence, and it goes on until everything is wrapped up. (Don’t let the credits fool you, though: there’s nothing else at the end of them.)
There’s plenty more I could pick at, and I’m sure most critics will hate this movie. This one is for the hardcore horror fans, and feels remarkable to exist at all. Ridiculous splatter movies like this usually have no budget, play at midnight at a genre festival, then get dumped on streaming. Horror fans have been given the gift of seeing mummified flesh ripped off on an IMAX screen, of all places. Enjoy it while you can. I guarantee you there won’t be anything quite this extreme for a while. At least not until the next Evil Dead movie comes out, and it’s going to have its work cut out for it.