Lee Cronin's The Mummy Review: Stylish and Atmospheric, but It's Still The Exorcist Movie

«Lee Cronin's The Mummy» is a horror film that shattered audience expectations. Not a reboot, not a sequel — a fundamentally different kind of movie. Where there used to be action-adventure, there's now domestic nightmare. Where there was exotic spectacle — there's home invasion horror. The film deliberately terrifies you with something that should have been a miracle: a missing child came back. Alive. Here's what the director of Evil Dead Rise pulled off.

First, let's be clear about which Mummy we're actually dealing with — because every generation has its own version. For some it's Boris Karloff wrapped in bandages back in 1932, for others it's Brendan Fraser with his charming smirk and Indiana Jones-style adventures. While you're at it, check out our list — 120 Best Movies of Recent Years.

In 2017, Universal tried to launch Tom Cruise alongside a mummy, bombed at the box office, and quietly buried the whole "Dark Universe" idea — much like what happened with Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, when the studio decided a dead-serious reboot was a good call.

Then in April 2026, Warner Bros., alongside Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, came at it from a completely different angle — bringing in Lee Cronin, the Irishman who resurrected Evil Dead Rise in 2023 and clearly had a blast doing it. His name in the title (Lee Cronin's The Mummy) isn't just a stylistic flourish. It's a warning: forget Fraser, forget adventure, forget the laughs. What you're getting is horror. Hard horror — rated R, running 133 minutes, with the signature visual nastiness that made Cronin a name after Evil Dead Rise. The Mummy earned its spot on our list of What to watch in April 2026: The best movies and TV shows of the month on Netflix, HBO, Apple TV+, and in cinemas. Producing the film are two of the biggest names in genre horror of the last decade: James Wan and Jason Blum.

One more thing worth clarifying upfront. Lee Cronin's The Mummy is not a film about Ancient Egypt. The Middle Kingdom here functions the way Batman or Spider-Man would if you dressed them in traditional Egyptian costume for a photoshoot — atmospheric, visually striking, works as set dressing, but under the bandages it's the same old Hollywood possession story.

If you're expecting a deep dive into Egyptian mythology or an authentic exploration of the lore — it's not here. If you want a solid possession horror wrapped in an unusual package — here you go. That cultural and religious contrast is actually one of the film's more interesting angles. Ancient Egyptian evil seeping into a neat, Catholic Italian-American household, and watching one slowly destroy the other. The Mummy runs roughly the same formula as in Scream movie series (by the way, here is our Scream 7 Movie Review): a well-assembled genre ride that won't leave lasting scars, but won't betray your expectations either.

The story opens in Cairo. Journalist Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is stationed there with his family — nurse wife Larissa (Laia Costa), nine-year-old daughter Katie (Natalie Grace), and son Sebastian (Shylo Molina). Then Katie is abducted. For eight years, the family exists in a state of suspended grief: they relocate to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to live with grandmother Carmen, have another child, try to hold it together. Everything changes with a phone call: Katie has been found — alive, inside an ancient sarcophagus, older but apparently unharmed.

The first thirty minutes or so are entirely about this: who the family was before the disappearance, what came after, what the waiting looked like. Short scenes, a few minutes each. No horror in them — though the evil is hardly idle between the cuts. Cronin deliberately gives the audience time to get a read on these people before everything starts falling apart. Does it work?

Debatable, honestly. Even someone barely familiar with the genre will clock immediately that Lee Cronin's The Mummy follows the same playbook as The Last Exorcism (2010), The Possession (2012), Annabelle (2014), Hereditary (2018), Talk to Me (2023), and the rest of the classic evil-force-inside-a-child horror canon. More examples you can find not in the movies, but in video games, just check up our top of Best Co-Op Horror Games — The Scariest Titles to Play with a Friend.

The ancient entity Nasmaranian that has possessed the girl is essentially an Egyptian name for a thoroughly recognizable archetype: an evil spirit kept captive inside a living vessel, sealed in a sarcophagus for millennia. When the old vessel — some other poor soul — began to die, the ritual keepers abducted Katie and performed the transfer. Dark fluid from the old mummy's mouth into the girl's, and there you have it: eight years in a box.

A family that believes in neither God nor the devil. A deeply religious Italian-American Catholic grandmother. A ritual keeping ancient evil contained. A possessed child and a parent deep in denial. A final exorcism — you could tick off every beat from the trailers alone without buying a ticket. Cronin doesn't try to subvert any of it. He just puts it all in a sarcophagus.

The characters are structured exactly the way horror demands — they're functional. The father senses something is wrong with Katie and pushes to find out the truth — that's his role. The mother keeps saying "she just needs love and time" and refuses to see what's in front of her until the very end — that's her role. Grandmother Carmen exists so the demon can make an especially brutal example of her. Little sister Maude shows up when the filmmakers need to demonstrate the demon taking hold of another child. The family's sprawling house turns out to have an entire second network of hidden corridors — because the demon needed somewhere to run along the walls at night.

Do you buy the Cannons as a real family? Not really — they're movie people. But that's not what's being asked of you. Cronin isn't building on psychological realism, he's building on atmosphere and escalation. And at that, he's genuinely good.

Among the cast, the father Charlie and teenage son Seb leave the strongest impression. Charlie because he's constantly in motion — investigating, pushing, his restlessness is contagious. Seb because despite limited screen time, he nails the role of an ordinary teenager slowly realizing, with mounting dread, that something is deeply wrong with his older sister. The mother and grandmother spend most of their screen time functioning as caretaker and victim, respectively.

Natalie Grace as the possessed Katie is a different kind of performance — one where the acting almost takes a back seat to the physical work: prosthetics, movement, and voice. On that front, the film delivers. The standard toolkit of possession horror is all here — unnatural body positions, a voice that seems to come from somewhere deep in the chest, running on the ceiling. Executed at exactly the level you'd expect from a Hollywood production.

The film's sharpest invention is the mechanics of containment. This isn't some abstract evil — it's a parasite that requires a living human host. What keeps it in check are protective seals, inscribed in cuneiform on strips of parchment that have literally become a second skin over the host's body. This is where the mundane post-"return" scenes earn their place: Katie being washed, changed, cleaned up. The camera deliberately avoids wide shots in favor of close-ups — rough, wrong-looking skin, grotesquely overgrown nails, warped limbs, brittle hair falling apart in clumps. It's not body horror for shock value alone, it's the concept made visible.

As long as the seals hold, the demon stays locked in. The breach happens almost by accident: while bathing Katie, the women scrub away part of that skin-like layer, unknowingly weakening the barrier. Later, Charlie realizes it isn't skin at all — it's the parchment inscribed with the binding spells. He literally peels the shell apart piece by piece, then races off to a local professor to learn more about the demon and early Egypt. Though in Lee Cronin's Mummy, academic expertise barely earns its keep — an AI translator would have done just as well.

For the first two thirds of the runtime, the demon doesn't attack directly — it applies pressure. It feeds on grief, destabilizes the psyche, probes for weak points. The children — Seb and Maude — crack first, which fits the film's internal logic: they're less resistant to the paranormal. Larissa is the exception. The demon pushes hard at her and gets nowhere. The film never explains why — maternal willpower, maybe, or her religious background. More likely it's a structural decision: Cronin needed adults functional enough to act in the finale.

Grandmother Carmen (Verónica Falcón) gets the full treatment, and the brutality of it is clearly tied to her faith. That's not a reading — it's in the staging. The demon, wearing Katie's face, corners her in her room. Carmen falls, recovers, tries to run — and finds the demon already blocking the door. It lifts her telekinetically, chokes her with her own crucifix (a pointed detail), and hurls her out the window onto the hood of a car, just as Charlie and Seb are pulling back from school. And it doesn't stop there: coyotes sprint toward the body and begin feeding on it in front of the family.

Then comes the funeral — and the demon doesn't miss the opportunity: it crawls from the room into the hall through the floorboards, works its way into the casket, desecrates the body — and grandmother rises from the dead. She's quite energetic about chasing the main characters around.

This is the film's greatest strength — and honestly, the main reason to bother seeing it at all.

The scene that sticks with you is the nail-clipping. Larissa is trying to restore some semblance of normalcy to her daughter: Katie's nails are practically stone. When she gets to the big toe, the clippers don't just take the nail — they strip an entire length of "skin" from the foot nearly up to the knee. One motion, no cutaway to spare you, with an almost tactile sense of texture.

The camera doesn't flinch, doesn't soften the moment, doesn't give the audience room to breathe. People in the theater went still. From there, the film keeps building on the same idea: Katie scratches herself raw, tearing away strips of the protective parchment. What initially reads as gross-out shock value gradually reveals itself as part of the film's internal logic.

The scorpion scene in the finale lands separately and hard. While Charlie is running from the demon — which is trying to break him through Katie — Cairo detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) faces off against the possessed Carmen. A scorpion crawls out of the grandmother's mouth, lunges at Dalia, and forces its way down her throat. When she tries to pull it back out, the tail punches through her neck from the inside. On the second attempt she finally gets it out — but the neck is already bleeding, forcing her to press her fingers into the wound and literally hold her own trachea in place while reciting the incantation. All of this while the father holds a thrashing Katie in a bear hug to keep her from breaking the ritual. The sequence is long, disgusting, and technically meticulous — it makes clear exactly why Cronin was given this project.

The third standout moment involves Maude. Already under the demon's influence, the younger sister calmly pulls out her teeth one by one, then picks up Carmen's fallen dentures and fits them in her own mouth — before attacking the pastor who's arrived to give last rites, a few seconds later. It's a brief scene, but it lingers, and it serves as a reminder: the demon isn't limited to Katie. The whole house is available to it.

The underlying formula: practical effects, minimal CGI, and a close attention to physiological and anatomical detail. Crunching sounds, wet sounds, seeping wounds, vomiting, strips of flesh, coyotes tearing into a body — Cronin builds dread not on jump scares alone, but on the audience's own physical response. This is exactly what people expected from him after Evil Dead Rise, and he doesn't disappoint. Not "frightening" in the sense that you'll lose sleep — horror fans have seen most of these moves a hundred times. But the execution is inventive: the same horror mechanics look different in Cronin's hands than they do in anyone else's, and you feel that distinction throughout. On a well-worn path, the filmmakers still managed to find their own footing — much like Zach Cregger did after Barbarian, reinventing himself with Companion.

Sound in Lee Cronin's The Mummy is a full creative collaborator, not just a soundtrack. There are plenty of jump scares, but they're placed to release tension that's been deliberately building — not to substitute for it. The sound team's best work comes through Katie: she's accompanied by thick, creaking, scraping, almost growling sounds that seem to emanate from somewhere deep and wrong. In venues with strong acoustics (IMAX), the effect becomes almost physical — you don't so much hear the sound as feel it.

The lighting is handled with equal care. Darkness in the frame never just "crushes" — it stays readable: contrast, shadow depth, and color accents all serve the atmosphere without the cheap underexposure feeling that plagued, say, the Battle of Winterfell in Game of Thrones.

The main complaint is with the cinematography itself. Shooting on the Sony Venice 2 at maximum aperture produces an extremely shallow depth of field. Cronin leans into it hard — he did the same thing in Evil Dead Rise. The result is that faces and eyes in focus look razor-sharp, while backgrounds in wider shots dissolve into a soft, formless blur. On a large IMAX screen this reads particularly sharply — there's a "vision degraded" quality where entire frames lose coherence.

Worth mentioning separately is Cronin's signature move: extended static close-ups with direct eye contact into the camera. Simply put: characters staring straight at the audience. In the right moments this effectively conveys a character's shock or vacancy. In the majority of moments — and there are a lot of them — it just feels like an unnecessary pause that bleeds the pacing dry. The balance lands here: sound and lighting confidently pull the atmosphere up to "excellent," while the cinematographic choices — technically interesting but not always justified — leave a persistent sense of overreach.

The film's biggest problem is its ending, which is a genuine shame given how well the structure holds up until then. Act one — Cairo, the abduction, eight years of waiting. This is the most restrained section: Cronin doesn't rush, gives the audience time to know the family and sit with the grief. Act two — Katie's return and the slow creep of ancient evil into an American home. This is where the film's best scenes live: the nail sequence, the grandmother's storyline, the gradual sense that the house has stopped being a safe place. The suspense works, the body horror is woven into the mechanics, the contrast between Catholic domestic life and an ancient curse holds. By the time the third act arrives, the audience is primed for a bleak, uncomfortable resolution.

Then the third act begins — and the film abruptly switches genres. This happens at precisely the moment when the logic demanded either a bitter ending (everyone dies, evil escapes) or at least a bittersweet one where the adults sacrifice themselves to save their children. The film even pretends Charlie is making that sacrifice. Then, just before the credits, the filmmakers reverse course: no, no, this is wide-release horror, let's have everyone walk out alive. After the merciless killing of the grandmother, after all the hard-won body horror, after the serious "destroyer of the family unit" undercurrent — the happy ending feels like a betrayal.

And by this point the plot scaffolding is already creaking under the weight. Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) flies in from Cairo carrying a VHS tape on which the keepers of the ancient cult have thoughtfully recorded the entire demon-transfer ritual. Not only has she fully grasped the ritual — she's memorized the required incantations by heart.

The basic problem here: early Egyptian writing, which the film nominally draws on, and the spoken performance of ritual are separated by literally thousands of years of linguistic drift. It's like taking a medieval Latin chronicle and, over the course of a transatlantic flight, turning it into a modern trap track with 808s. It's a purely decorative, Hollywood-style move — it just has to sound ancient and mystical, while what it actually was is beside the point. It works as a scene, but anyone who's ever cracked open an Egyptology textbook will cringe.

And who even is Detective Zaki? The character exists in the film for exactly one purpose: to arrive in the third act with a ready-made solution — a textbook deus ex machina, just with a VHS tape instead of a lightning bolt. The questions surrounding her storyline are too numerous to fully list. Why would the keepers have recorded their secret ritual on video in the first place? How does Zaki magically retain lengthy Ancient Egyptian incantations and reproduce them correctly? How do they wrap Charlie in protective seals within a matter of seconds, when the ancient craftsmen presumably didn't knock those out in five minutes? Why did no Egyptology professor, no academic delegation, no journalist turn up around this family during eight years of waiting — let alone after the girl was found, an event that would have sent the entire academic world into a frenzy? The film doesn't answer any of this, because it was never trying to — and attempting to answer these questions would only break it further.

Lee Cronin's The Mummy is a by-the-book horror that knows exactly what it's doing and does it professionally. The atmosphere is strong, the body horror is genuinely repellent, the jump scares are placed with intelligence, and individual scenes are inventive in ways that stick with you. Genre fans will get a familiar but well-executed package. Anyone who came hoping for Brendan Fraser-style adventure: the title warned you. The film earns its ticket price.