Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (2026)

Lee Cronin puts his name in the title and then has to live with that decision for 134 minutes. Some of those minutes he earns. Others he simply occupies.

The setup is shrewder than the premise suggests. Instead of the adventure-serial bombast that made the 1999 version so enjoyably disposable, Cronin grounds his horror in a family receiving their missing daughter back after eight years. She was found in a sarcophagus. The relevant authorities, apparently satisfied with this, sent her home. Something old has arrived with her, and the film’s most disturbing idea is not what that something does to people’s bodies — though it does plenty — but how long a parent can go on denying what’s really going on when the truth is staring them in the face.

The creature design is where Cronin does his most careful work. He researched North African visual traditions and studied the preserved bog bodies at Dublin’s National Museum, and the result is a mummy that looks like it came from the ground rather than from a production meeting. The physical deterioration is wet, incremental, wrong and is where the real horror lives.

May Calamawy holds the film together through passages that would otherwise collapse. She plays a mother operating on a decision made out of her conscious awareness. And she tracks that self-deception without ever announcing it. Jack Reynor, as the journalist father, is a different problem entirely. He is not giving a bad performance so much as a performance that belongs to a quieter film, one with more silence and less arterial spray. He seems to have arrived on the wrong set and decided to make the best of it.

The film’s best sequences arrive when Cronin abandons explanation and simply commits to chaos. A wake that turns catastrophic has a physical extravagance and a blackly comic timing that briefly suggests what the whole film might have been. A scene involving deviled eggs and a wine glass is the kind of thing you describe to someone the next day and watch their expression change. What makes these sequences frightening is their demented logic, the sense that this particular disaster could only unfold in exactly this way.

The procedural strand is where the film loses its footing, and in my opinion never fully recovers it. Cronin devotes a lot of the running time to reconstructing, step by careful step, how an ancient force came to inhabit a small girl, which makes for some impatience in waiting to get to the real horror. The more thoroughly he accounts for it, the less frightening it becomes. Cronin’s set pieces suggest he knows this and, unfortunately, the rest of the film suggests he was overruled.

Ninety minutes of this, with the procedural machinery stripped back, might have left a film with a more venomous sting. At 134, it leaves something intermittently impressive and frequently its own worst enemy. Cronin’s name on the title is fair. The film just needed someone to tell him when to stop talking.