Whisper House Press

Film: Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

Director: Lee Cronin

Writer: Lee Cronin

Cast: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Veronica Falcón

Production Companies: New Line Cinema, Atomic Monster, Blumhouse, Wicked/Good

Release Date: April 17, 2026

Robert’s Rating: 2.5⭐ out of 5⭐

Beware, Spoilers!

A hypothesis occurred to me while I was watching Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (hereafter The Mummy) (2026). The director’s name is in the film title not so much because he deserves it but because there are so many different iterations of “The Mummy” that tacking it on is an easy—perhaps necessary—way to distinguish this film from the others. 

The film starts by following a family and its matriarch The Magician (Hayat Kamille) out for a drive. Soon after they arrive home, we learn they have an all but buried pyramid on their property, complete with a mummy-containing sarcophagus! Meanwhile, Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor)—reporter, husband, and father—is living in Cairo for work. He has a young daughter named Katie, a younger son, and another child on the way. After Charlie’s wife Larissa goes to work one day, Charlie takes a phone call. While he’s on the call, Katie is abducted by The Magician, kicking off the driving conflict of the film. Katie reappears eight years later, awakening in a  sarcophagus found in the wreckage of a plane crash. She is traumatized, both physically and emotionally. 

The Mummy seems to be following a trend of directors really leaning on family drama to tell their horror stories. You can trace it back to at least Hereditary and follow it through Midsommar, Talk to Me, and Bring Her Back. If you’re like me, your mileage here may vary. With The Mummy, I had to remind myself that Katie was more or less a demonic entity rather than a traumatized little girl (the film eventually explains that The Magician had Katie possessed by a demon and then mummified her body to keep that demon contained).

Cronin directed 2023’s Evil Dead Rise. I had many issues with The Mummy, but my biggest was that it really seemed to be too heavily influenced (possessed, if you will) by that previous Cronin film. It’s almost as if Cronin had so much fun making an Evil Dead movie that he can’t shake the franchise. For instance, there’s a scene in which Charlie is examining some creepy hieroglyphics—he might as well have been reading the Evil Dead series’ Necronomicon. 

I did enjoy May Calamawy as a Cairo police officer. I thought she was great in Marvel’s Moon Knight, so I knew she’d be a bright spot here. I also appreciated some of the film’s cinematography and clocked at least two split diopter shots.

Lee Cronin apparently wanted to investigate how a modern family would handle a mummification dilemma, and he certainly accomplished this. And the film is perhaps one of the darkest and nastiest movies I’ve ever seen, which I’m sure the director was going for. He probably wasn’t intending for it to evoke the Evil Dead franchise so much, however.

Perhaps this hollow take on a modern mummy story should have stayed buried in Cronin’s mind.