“What happened to Katie?” is the question around which much of the marketing for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is centered. The tagline, trite as it may be, has been incessantly presented to audiences through posters, trailers, and social media posts, a half-hearted attempt on behalf of Blumhouse and co. to conjure an air of mystery—a “well, we have to see this” quality—around its latest subversion of a historic horror IP.
It’s a fundamentally misconceived and futile strategy, as the film’s title provides our answer: Katie (Natalie Grace) was mummified (shocking!). This isn’t a spoiler: it’s the name of the movie. The film, to its credit, does have a few tricks up its sleeve with regard to auxiliary lore, but it’s fundamentally being sold on a question its title has already answered.
This is what makes the structure of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy so bizarre, or perhaps so brazen: it operates as a deliberately paced mystery throughout much of its runtime, an enigmatic puzzle we’re meant to slowly piece together, one grotesque piece at a time. Katie’s status as a recently disentombed, decomposing, and explicitly possessed child is positioned not as a given, but as a source of constant intrigue, “what happened to her?” serving not as much as a clichéd marketing ploy as it does the crux of the movie. We progressively learn more about the nature of Katie’s condition—the what eventually gives way to the why—but the ultimate reveal, though garnished by some vaguely interesting additional elements, is already spelled out atop our ticket stub.
And it’s this fundamentally frustrating and ill-conceived structure that ultimately serves as the film’s downfall, a fissure across which its stronger elements can’t effectively bridge to create a cohesive and satisfying whole. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is not without its bright spots; it’s unrelenting and completely unafraid to revel in revulsion, in its strongest moments feeling like the vile hellspawn of Bring Her Back and Evil Dead. These strongest moments, however, are too few and far between, momentary peaks in what is otherwise an unbalanced, derivative, and irritating montage of gnarly gore scenes that offer little beyond being gnarly.
Aptly the third feature from writer/director Lee Cronin, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy follows the Cannon family, an American expat unit whom we first meet in urban Cairo. Ascending journalist Charlie (Jack Reynor) teaches Morse code to his daughter Katie (portrayed as a child by Emily Mitchell), their lesson interrupted when Charlie notices one of his reports being broadcast on television. His son Sebastian (portrayed as a child by Dean Allen Williams and as a teen by Shylo Molina) pokes fun at his incessant hand usage while talking, immediately establishing an affable and generally engaging rapport among the three. This doesn’t last long, as Katie is promptly abducted under mysterious circumstances.
Charlie and his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), file a missing persons report with prospective detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), but little work is done as those within the Cairo police suspect familial foul play. Eight years pass before any real leads surface, at which point the Cannons have moved back to Albuquerque and welcomed another daughter, Maud (Billie Roy), to the family; it’s then that a decomposing, but still living Katie is disentombed from a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus recovered near the site of a plane crash, leading to Katie’s hasty reintroduction into her family. Something, however, is off about Katie, and we spend the rest of the runtime attempting to figure out what happened to her as she performs increasingly horrid acts within the Cannon family home.
The film, up to and through Katie’s discovery and reintroduction, is effective, and the moments in which members of the Cannon family see their kin for the first time in nearly a decade—in this state—are incredibly tense. Lensed by cinematographer Dave Garbett (who previously worked with Cronin on Evil Dead Rise), the frequent split diopter shots used throughout this sequence perfectly capture both Katie’s condition and her family’s reactions, the nauseating makeup and cosmetics applied to Grace brilliantly underscoring the horror of the situation. It’s a solid first act that, in theory, provides a strong foundation on which a satisfying film could be constructed; unfortunately, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy quickly falls into monotony, with the rest of the movie following a structure and formula shockingly similar to that of Evil Dead Rise as it attempts to solve a mystery that, again, the audience knew the answer to the moment they read the film’s title.
The Cannons quickly notice that the Katie they’ve recovered is not the Katie they lost; they’re told she’s in a catatonic-like state, but as the abhorrence of her actions steadily increases, it becomes clear that there’s a deeper, perhaps supernatural issue at play. This conundrum takes up the bulk of the film’s 133-minute runtime, with grotesque sequences of gore and body horror layered alongside thriller-adjacent scenes in which Charlie attempts to figure out just what is going on. These overtly gory scenes themselves, though a bit one-note, aren’t necessarily without merit, but it’s, again, the basic structure that makes the movie quickly grow tiresome; most of the sequences featuring Katie are unforgivingly vile, but they intend to communicate the same idea, before long making them feel tedious and superfluous. Charlie’s ‘mystery’ plot does not work on a fundamental level, as the audience, again, already knows its basic resolution.
This is where issues with the film’s script become most prevalent, as its underdeveloped characters, iffy character decisions and motivations, and questionable dialogue emphasize its ill-conceived structure. Despite being a two-plus hour horror film, we don’t really get ample time with any particular character to make us feel all that invested in them or their fate; it’s unbalanced, attempting to be a possessed child body horror movie, tense domestic mystery, and Cairo-set detective thriller all at once while never wholly succeeding in any of these endeavors. The film is perhaps most engaging when it follows Calamawy’s detective character in Egypt, as these sequences have an almost The Silence of the Lambs flavor to them as Dalia Zaki pieces together a story that is rapidly increasing in scope. This subplot, however, feels like an underbaked detour from the rest of the film despite its conceptual quality, like a brief visitation to a different—and better—movie that exists only amongst monotony.
The largely pedestrian performances across the board don’t do much to help the film’s fortunes, but the script paints almost every single character as foolish and obtuse, if it bothers to give them any characterization at all. The movie also has the frustrating tendency to set things up that it doesn’t effectively pay off, at times, bizarrely so, given the presence of situations in which particular pay-offs would be natural and narratively satisfying. The dialogue is also a bit awkward and clumsy throughout, an issue that carries over from Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise; though there are no lines in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy that rival the middle-school, faux-cool nature of “Mommy’s with the maggots now,” there are a few that come close (i.e. “Don’t worry Grandma, it’s fun to be dead”).
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is not a wholly ineffective or unsuccessful film, as there is something to be said for its tone and spirit. Though unabasically gruesome and cruel horror has grown a bit more mainstream in recent years, rarely do you see a major studio (in this case, New Line, and by extension, Warner Bros.) devote considerable resources to those types of projects. To see a movie as deliberately mean-spirited—and generally gross—as Lee Cronin’s The Mummy get studio support indicates contemporary strength in the horror genre and a willingness on behalf of Hollywood’s major players to take risks (even if this particular risk is borrowing the name of a century-old IP). There’s also some stylistic flair on display throughout, with Cronin collaborating with Garbett to craft a picture that, while at times narratively tiresome, is rarely dull visually.
But it just doesn’t come together, this sentiment amplified by a bombastic third act and ultimate conclusion that feel disloyal to the rest of the film. And what’s perhaps most frustrating about Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is that the concept has inherent potential; the film is Blumhouse’s third modern reimagining of a classic Universal Monster movie, joining the ranks of The Invisible Man (2020) and Wolf Man (2025). Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is fundamentally akin to its contemporaries in that it’s analogous to its Golden Age predecessor in name only, but where it differs—and where it has a theoretical advantage—is in precedent, as the general idea of a ‘mummy movie,’ through several disparate interpretations over the decades, has eroded to the point of becoming amorphous.
There’s no clear or definitive set of expectations for what a movie called The Mummy is supposed to entail, as several films of wholly different subject matters, tones, and genres have carried the title over the years. Brendan Fraser’s 1999 action spectacle bears little resemblance to the 1932 Boris Karloff horror classic on which it’s purportedly based, despite sharing a title; Tom Cruise’s The Mummy (2017) may as well reside in a different galaxy than the aforementioned films—in fact, we’d all be better off for it. The ‘mummy movie’ concept has been iterated on enough over the past century that it’s a blank canvas, a sandbox in which a filmmaker has ample room to put their own distinct twist on the material.
Which is what makes Cronin’s rather generic, narratively unbalanced, and structurally unsound possessed child take on the concept all the more underwhelming. It wears its influences (namely The Exorcist, The Omen, and the Evil Dead franchise) on its sleeve to the point of becoming derivative, with the cues it takes from Cronin’s own movie being the most conspicuous. The gnarly gore scenes throughout are worth the price of admission for those who value and prioritize carnage in horror cinema, but their one-note nature does little to augment what is otherwise a misconceived movie that spends too much of its time searching for an answer to a question we already know the answer to. Cronin gives a valiant effort, but ultimately, his take on the ‘mummy’ mythos becomes too enwrapped in monotony to recommend.
