‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ review: fresh, frightening take on a classic movie monster

We know what you’re thinking: who the heck is Lee Cronin and why should we care about his mum? Long story short: it seems there are so many movies about the titular creature that the director’s name has been appended to differentiate this one from all the others. And – to answer your other question – no, Brendan Fraser isn’t in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (though he will be in the upcoming third sequel to the action franchise he kicked off in 1999).

Look, let’s not get too hung up on the name thing. In fact, they needn’t have called this one The Mummy at all, given how far removed it is from the iconography you might associate with the bandaged baddie at the heart of the movie. Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa Cannon (Laia Costa), a TV reporter and nurse respectively, are living in Cairo with their two young children, Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastián (Shylo Molina). They experience every parent’s worst nightmare when Katie goes missing, a horror that is as effectively wrought as anything else in this frankly demented film.

Fast-forward eight years, the couple now have another daughter Maud (Billie Roy) and are doing what they can to move on with their lives, aided by Larissa’s mother Carmen (Verónica Falcón). When a helicopter crashes in woodland, however, it’s the beginning of a whole new nightmare. The only survivor is found to be bandaged and sealed inside a sarcophagus. They’re alive but in a very bad way and unable to communicate. Guess who?

From this point on, the film teeters around self-parody but barrels along with such joie de vivre (or, more accurately, the joy of being undead) that you’re swept up along with it. Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) is so obviously a demonic mummy – papery skin covered in filthy rags, toenails like an eagle’s beak – that it’s unintentionally funny to see the Cannons gently reintroduce her to the family home. One scene where Larissa attempts to sort out those gnarly feet is surely nailed-on (pun intended) fodder for the inevitable sequel to the upcoming Scary Movie reboot.

But then perhaps that’s partly the point: the movie goes to such dark places that it could become totally unwatchable if it wasn’t a little cartoony. Cronin, a burgeoning horror auteur who’s only on his third feature following 2019’s Hole In The Ground and 2023’s Evil Dead Rise, ratchets up the tension with glee. The final hour or so unravels like a flailing bandage into a relentless onslaught of guts, gore and – in one deliciously deranged set-piece – false gnashers.

Along with dogged detective Dalia (May Calamawy), Charlie puts his reporting skills to good use to figure out what happened to Katie and how they might reverse it, adding an engrossing element of mystery to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. That title wrongly suggests the work of an artistic visionary scaling new heights of elevated horror; instead, this is a fun, dumb thrill ride that breathes powerfully fetid air into the ongoing string of mummy movies. Over to you, Brendan.

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