There is a particular kind of confidence required to put your own name in a film’s title. Lee Cronin does it here — and for the most part, he earns it. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy arrives as a deliberate act of brand distinction. Cronin stakes his authorial claim on a franchise that has spent nearly a century stumbling between grandeur and absurdity. His version doesn’t entirely escape that stumble. Still, it delivers enough visceral force and emotional ambition to establish itself as something genuinely new.
Cronin sets his story in Cairo, where American journalist Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) lives with his pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and their two young children. Within the film’s opening act, their pre-teen daughter Katie vanishes into a sandstorm. She doesn’t simply run off. She disappears with the specific horror of parental helplessness — there one moment, gone the next — and Cronin stages that abduction with genuine craft.
Eight years pass. The family relocates to Albuquerque, New Mexico, hollowed out and still grieving. Then the call comes: Katie is alive. Authorities found her sealed inside an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, discovered in the wreckage of a plane crash. She returns home grey-skinned, near-mute, and barely recognizable. The reunion the family prayed for turns, quickly, into something far worse.
This is where Cronin’s structural instinct works best. Rather than rushing toward supernatural spectacle, he lingers in the domestic dread of caring for a child who is technically present but psychically absent. The early scenes of the family tending to the returned Katie — feeding her, repositioning her, watching her with mounting unease — carry real weight. Cronin channeled grief over losing his own mother into this film, and that emotional undertow is palpable, even when the screenplay stretches thin.
In terms of sheer physical performance, newcomer Natalie Grace is the film’s most remarkable achievement. She plays the transformed Katie — possessed by an ancient Egyptian demon called the Nasmaranian — and she contorts, snarls, and unsettles with a commitment that demands attention. The prosthetics and practical effects surrounding her performance are formidable. Cronin has always favored practical horror over CGI gloss. Accordingly, the effects here feel tactile and genuinely unpleasant in the best tradition of the genre.
Reynor and Costa anchor the emotional core as parents caught between love and survival. Reynor handles Charlie’s slow psychological unraveling with restraint. He refuses to let the character become pure reactive surface, even as the script occasionally demands exactly that. Costa brings a ferocity to Larissa that the film sometimes underutilizes. However, when the screenplay gives her room, she delivers.
The film’s most genuinely interesting performance comes from May Calamawy as Detective Dalia Zaki, the Cairo investigator who has spent eight years pursuing Katie’s case. Calamawy — Egyptian-Palestinian by heritage — brings an earned specificity to the role. She plays Dalia as someone whose professionalism has calcified around a guilt she won’t fully examine. The performance cuts through the film’s busiest sequences with quiet precision.
Cronin has cited his pride in casting authentic Egyptian actors and incorporating Arabic dialogue throughout. That effort is genuine. Compared to the franchise’s long history of Orientalist caricature, it represents a meaningful step. Furthermore, Calamawy and British-Iraqi actress Hayat Kamille bring non-decorative cultural weight to the production. Nevertheless, the film’s frame still belongs to the American family. Cairo functions largely as a staging ground for their trauma, and Egyptian characters ultimately orbit the Cannons’ story rather than driving their own. The representational progress is real but incomplete — an improvement the industry should recognize while pressing further.
But Lee Cronin’s The Mummy overextends. The third act struggles under the weight of mythology it has introduced. The Nasmaranian’s rules of possession arrive via an exposition-heavy sequence involving an archaeology professor — a cliche Cronin knows better than to lean on, but does anyway. By the time the film reaches its climax, the pacing has frayed noticeably.
There is also the question of genre identity. Cronin has described the film as one part Poltergeist and one part Se7en, filtered through his own sensibility. In practice, it lands closer to The Exorcist by way of Evil Dead Rise — a possessed-child narrative with Egyptian trappings rather than a true Mummy film. The bandages and sarcophagus feel, at times, like branding rather than mythology. Audiences expecting the ancient-Egyptian-curse framework of earlier iterations will find this version deliberately disinterested in that lineage.
That said, what Cronin does with the family horror framework is more than serviceable. He builds dread through environment and sound design rather than jump scares alone. The film’s color palette — drawing, per Cronin’s own admission, from Breaking Bad’s desaturated New Mexico look — gives the suburban sequences a sickly, washed-out quality that keeps the horror visually grounded.
The horror genre travels well. Unlike comedy — which relies on culturally specific registers — horror communicates in a near-universal emotional grammar. Fear of losing a child, dread of something returning from the dead, the violation of domestic safety: these premises require no translation. Moreover, the film’s Arabic dialogue and Egyptian cast give it cultural texture that resonates differently in Middle Eastern and North African markets than the franchise’s previous iterations ever could.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is not the reinvention it occasionally implies it might be. It runs too long, leans too heavily on familiar third-act mechanics, and stays insufficiently committed to the Egyptian mythology it half-heartedly invokes. Yet it is viscerally alive in ways that much mainstream horror no longer manages. Cronin directs with technical confidence and a genuine willingness to disturb. Natalie Grace’s performance is the kind of physical horror acting that gets remembered. And the film’s emotional core — grief, parental love as both protection and exposure, the uncanny horror of a child returned wrong — gives the gorier sequences the weight they need.
The franchise, buried for so long under the weight of its own misfires, resurfaces here with more vitality than it has earned. What Cronin does next with this world — and whether he will bring sharper narrative architecture to match his undeniable atmospheric gifts — remains the more interesting question.
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