REVIEW: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)

Contains spoilers for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy tells the traditionally action-packed cautionary tale of disturbing ancient relics and ruins from a distinctly different angle than its predecessors. Rather than juicy action sequences and witty quips, this year’s version of The Mummy is full of trauma, tears, and tension. Oh, and body horror. Lots of body horror.

The movie begins in Aswan, Egypt, where the Khalil family returns to their home to find their pet bird dead. Rather than comfort their children, the parents (played by Hayat Kamille and Omar El-Saeidi) rush down to their cellar, much of which is taken up by a black pyramid that contains a black sarcophagus. The mummified remains within the sarcophagus animate, and as her husband is killed, the mother (credited only as The Magician) seems to understand what she must do.

We’re then whisked away to Cairo, where investigative reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) and nurse Larissa Cannon (Laia Costa) live with their children Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams) and Katie (Emily Mitchell). After a brief introduction to the family’s dynamics that includes some wonderful acting from both child actors, the main conflict of the story is kicked into gear as Katie is lured off of her family’s property by The Magician. Charlie and Larissa report her kidnapping to the local authorities, but we quickly realize their efforts came too late as the film jumps eight years forward in time and miles across the globe to Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Throughout the rest of the movie, the Cannons try to reintegrate Katie back into the family, only to discover that the force that has destroyed their oldest daughter is now destroying anyone that gets in its way. 

It’s here that the film anchors itself firmly in the genre of horror; specifically, the subgenre of possession horror. Katie (now older and played by Natalie Grace) is unique from antagonists in the prior iterations of The Mummy in that she isn’t a powerful entity that the main characters must defeat; she's a girl who suffered immense trauma, had her childhood taken from her, and was desperately missed by her family. The circumstances of Katie becoming possessed by the spirit of the titular mummy are not dressed up as mystical and otherworldly; they’re rooted in real tragedies that happen far too often.

The way Katie is lured away by a friend’s mother - not a stranger - is in line with how many children are abducted by people they know. The fact that Katie was taken while her father was close by is used to put suspicion on himself and his wife, a course of logic that might seem familiar to anyone familiar with the cases of JonBenét Ramsey and Madeleine McCann. The video that reveals exactly what happened to Katie feels like a piece of evidence in a human trafficking case, not documentation of a magic ritual. When Katie is back home with her family, she doesn’t act like an all-powerful being that’s briefly using this girl’s body as a vessel - she acts like someone who’s suffered years of abuse and neglect.

All of these choices to root the Cannon’s story in reality feel very intentional. The experience of having a loved one go missing is horrifying, and the inversion of the happy ending where that loved one comes back is even more so. These choices succeed in creating a grim atmosphere that is rife with scares, but they also create a heavier atmosphere of sadness.

There are two things that stuck with me after I left the theater: the scene where Katie’s nail comes off in the most stomach-churning way possible, and the scene where Katie’s parents have to watch the video of her being ritually sacrificed. The former was what I considered the peak of great body horror moments; the latter is what I considered the peak of the film’s pessimism. The former stayed with me because it made my skin crawl; the latter stayed with me because it made me incredibly sad.

Overall, I enjoyed Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, though I couldn’t shake the feeling that at its core, it was a more mean-spirited re-treading of the story told in Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise. Both films focus on the perversion of the family unit through possession, but where Evil Dead Rise leaves the viewer with a sense of hope rooted in familial love, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy forces the viewer to reconcile with the fact that the ones who love us the most are the ones who can hurt us the most.

And they will.