2026 | rated R | starring Jack Raynor, Laia Costa, Natlie Grace | written & directed by Lee Cronin | 2 hr 14 mins | 2 1/2 out of 5 |
In 2017, Universal attempted to boot up a big Hollywood interconnected universe of their Universal Monster Movies starting with the tonal misfire of the Tom Cruise action movie The Mummy. While that project went up in smoke (living on hypothetically in the accomplishment of the fan fiction mega-podcast Are You Afraid of the Dark Universe?), the success of the 2020 The Invisible Man (still standing by my 5/5 for that one) showed Universal the way and they followed suit, updating these monsters as small, standalone horror films with up-and-coming directors. We ended up getting exactly that: Leigh Whannell returning for the The Wolf Man (2/5), the unofficial Dracula movie with Robert Eggers’ incredible Nosferatu (5/5), Guillermo Del Toro gave us a lavish beautiful Frankenstein (4 1/2 / 5) and a Creature from the Black Lagoon update in The Shape of Water (4/5) and Maggie Gylennhaal turned The Bride of Frankenstein into a feminist 1930s gangster movie (where Mary Shelley seems jealous that James Whale’s sequel has overshadowed her own creation) in the lame, but stylish The Bride (2/5).
I mention all of this because that’s the most interesting context to view Lee Cronin’s The Mummy in. As another addition to this independent slate of Universal monster movie updates turned into true horror or fantasy films, now cycling all the way back to the beginning and attempting a Mummy update as it probably should have been in the first place. Theoretically, at least. The 2026 Mummy is another possession and body horror movie from the director of Evil Dead Rise, with some Egyptian mythology worked into the mix to meet the mandate of the title. I won’t say that it’s barely a mummy movie, as the most horrific scenes in it are related to entombing a person in sarcophagus and wrapping them in bandages, but it does take those elements and fundamentally turn them into another demon possession movie in execution. It’s a long movie, bloated by the necessity to start in Egypt but have the horror take place in America.
What Cronin brings to the table, that the movies above do not, is an unflinching level of cruelty and suffering he wants to inflict on this family, particularly a small child. Where everyone asks for monsters and blood and bumps in the night, Cronin shows up with actually horrific stuff – parents coping with their young daughter being kidnapped, terrified and possessed. It’s like the SNL sketch where The Rock shows up to a meeting of self-proclaimed evil scientists with an idea for a child molesting robot and is shocked that they are shocked that he carried out the assignment to be evil. “You asked for horror, right?” It was taboo for decades to do harm to a child. It was controversial of Halloween 3 in 1982 for the children to be targets of industrialized murder. Now, it’s fashionable and Cronin rolls around in this mud like a pig.
It’s disturbing and unpleasant, but it’s also not particularly entertaining. The family is thinly drawn and hard to root for. Lead by Charlie (Jack Raynor, famously of Midsommar) and Larissa (Laia Costa, Victoria) with son Sebastian and young daughters Maud and Katie (Natalie Grace), the Cannon family lives in Egypt while dad Charlie works as a reporter when Katie is kidnapped. The family moves back to the states and is functionally destroyed, an angry, sad zombie of itself, until Katie turns back up, catatonic, traumatized and wrapped in bandages. Charlie is plagued by trying to know what happened to Katie while Larissa tries to bring her back. Eventually the investigation uncovers a horrific ritual and a demon that tears through the family home.
Cronin knows how to stage these kinds of attack scenes so the first and third act of this movie is actually pretty lively. But its cruelty is almost matched beat-by-beat with its generic haunting tricks. Unnatural smiles, children issuing threats beyond their years. It drags greatly in the middle. Cronin understood the assignment here, far better than Alex Kurtzman’s The Mummy. I’d rather watch this any day. But its cruelty is a spike in an otherwise pretty generic possession film.
It’s clear that Cronin’s name in the title is a way to distinguish this movie from other Mummy films, all of which are very different, and possibly for legal reasons. With just 2 features at his back Cronin, talented as he is, hasn’t earned the kind of reputation as a director who can open a movie yet. That’s the biggest surprise about a movie called Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – is that it lacks a distinct vision. In a lot of ways it feels like Cronin has made another tale of taunting Evil Dead Deadites and slapped a Mummy label on it than anything that would turn Cronin into a new horror visionary.