In 2023, writer/director Lee Cronin showed up on my radar when the very taut, tense and delightfully absurd Evil Dead Rise was released. That film didn’t set the world on fire, but did well enough to initiate another entry into the Evil Dead franchise, which Cronin declined to direct. This happened because Cronin was approached by Jason Blum, to direct a reimagining of The Mummy for Blumhouse. Unsubstantiated claims report that Cronin’s screenplay wasn’t for a Mummy film at all, but Blum and his producing team found ways to tie it to this classic lore. A trailer for Evil Dead Burn, the film that Cronin did not make next, played before my screening of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy yesterday. I spent much of the next two and a half hours wishing I was watching that movie instead. 

Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a news reporter who lives in Cairo with his pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa), son Sebastian and daughter Katie. One day, Katie is abducted and is never heard from again until 8 years later, when she is found alive…kind of. Charlie and Larissa are overcome with emotion to find their years-long search for their daughter had finally come to an end, but when they finally see Katie again, it’s clear something far more sinister and disturbing is going on with Katie. 

I understand that characters have to behave like idiots in horror movies. Otherwise there’d often be no movie. But the way the central couple in this movie reacts to everything is so unrealistic and absurd from the very beginning, so much so that I could never really get into this story. When they are re-introduced to Katie, she looks like a zombie. She’s non-verbal but makes weird generic horror movie sounds. She can’t look at them, but she growls and grunts and sneers and it’s not long before she’s projectile vomiting all over the place, screaming vile, horrible things and levitating midair. 

I’m not a parent, so I can’t speak to the primal protective instinct that takes over between parents and their children. But immediately taking their daughter home in the condition they find her in, feels absolutely ridiculous. And then when they drag her wheelchair upstairs, clank-clank-clanking it up each step rather than, just, I don’t know, moving her room to the bottom floor of this enormous house, took me out of the film more. Every decision here seemed so purposely divorced from reality, so much so that I was never able to take this film seriously. That wouldn’t be a problem if Cronin didn’t so clearly WANT you to take it seriously.

Jack Reynor, who I remember from Midsommar, isn’t really given a lot of room to give a performance. He’s mainly doing a deer in the headlights reaction face for the majority of the runtime and after awhile that becomes rather boring to watch. Same goes for Laia Costa, who is similarly never given adequate enough real estate to make this character her own. Verónica Falcón, as Larissa’s mother, however, is quite fun to watch although it seems like she’s in a completely different movie than everyone else. She seems to be actively leaning into the wacky, which the film could have used more of. I also enjoyed May Calamawy as the detective investigating Katie’s case. She brings a grounded humanness and a realism to the film that is entirely absent in the rest of it. 

It’s not lost on me that most audiences will see the tile Lee Cronin’s The Mummy and not know who Cronin is. I admit, I didn’t immediately know off the top of my head, but my interest was piqued a bit more once I realized this was the guy who made Evil Dead Rise. I will say the style Cronin displayed in Rise is very much intact here. There’s an emphasis on practical effects, lots of grotesque makeup and gallons of fake blood. There’s also an immersive squelchy, crunchy, gloopy quality to the sound design that would go a lot further if the film were better. Cronin brings back Dave Garbett, his cinematographer from Evil Dead Rise, and there’s a great sense of dread in the atmosphere. Aesthetically, this film is doing everything it should do, but the larger problem here is the script. 

Cronin also wrote this screenplay, and you could easily imagine a world in which this wasn’t meant to be a Mummy film at all, and this was just an unrelated haunting story that Hollywood producers decided in a coke-fueled writer’s room, to connect to an intellectual property that everyone knows. And if that were the case, it feels like it would’ve made a lot more sense to call this movie something-something Exorcist instead. But the bigger problem here is the screenplay for the movie Cronin actually did make. The pacing is a huge problem – the film runs 133 minutes long, and boy, does it feel like it. It feels like we’re making our way through the same horror setpiece several times, and there’s not enough variation between them to make any particular sequence hit the way it needs to. And as a result, I mentally checked out early into the film and it never managed to get me back. 

If you’re buying a ticket to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy for the guts and gore, you’ll get it. There’s plenty about this film that’s viscerally disgusting, but unfortunately nothing that’s actually scary. Horror aficionados who flock to this kind of thing for the vibes alone might leave the film happy. But I wanted more – something to grab onto emotionally or some reason to care about any of these people or what’s happening to them. And instead I just sat there, rolling my eyes, laughing in scenes where I probably wasn’t supposed to, and checking my watch, desperate for the film to be put out of its misery. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy doesn’t work as a reimagining of the classic Mummy lore, and doesn’t work on its own as a horror film either.