Blumhouse Horror shoots another terrifying film in Ireland, so our in-house horror expert takes a look.
There’s a strain of horror that tackles grief with nuance, addressing it with tasteful, solemn allegory. But grief is messy. Loud. Irrational. It has teeth, and sometimes bites. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy understands this.
This isn’t a tune-up of the classic Universal horror property so much as a full-on remodel. Anyone turning up for swaggering archaeologists and a mute, limping villain will need a moment to recalibrate. The title points a rotting finger one way, while the film lunges somewhere else entirely, somewhere closer to The Exorcist than anything involving Boris Karloff or Brendan Fraser. You’ll recognise the dusty bones of the franchise - archaic rituals, baking deserts, a centuries-old evil - but Cronin drains the swamp of any fetid tropes and pours in something unashamedly - for lack of a classier word - batshit.
The predominant thread tying Cronin’s latest feature to his other work is a refusal to play safe. It’s a savage affair, unafraid to let its own reckless impulses run rampant, leading you to gag, or laugh at the wrong moments. The two-hour-plus runtime of raucous, disgusting intensity finally reaches something surprisingly intimate - a version of myth more focused on the curse of a parent’s unconditional love than one which springs a trap inside a pyramid.
The setup is straightforward. In Cairo, eight-year-old Katie Cannon vanishes after being lured away by a woman with sinister intentions. Eight years later, her family has relocated to New Mexico in an attempt to heal. Then Katie resurfaces, pulled from a plane crash, wrapped in parchment inside a three thousand-year-old sarcophagus. She is alive, but beyond that any resemblance ends.
Cronin takes his time establishing the family dynamic before the spookery is fully unleashed. The Cannons decide to handle Katie’s rehab themselves. They bring her back home, hoping love, normalcy and denial will do what hospitals cannot. Of course, they are catastrophically mistaken. Cronin’s interests haven’t shifted much since his excellent debut, The Hole in the Ground. He likes families under siege, homes transformed to hostile battlegrounds, children who are… not quite children anymore. The difference here is scale. His Mummy is big and loud, sprawling across continents and centuries. Yet it still circles back to the same question Cronin asks in his other features: how much horror will parents tolerate if it means their child stays breathing?
This kind of faith in a director’s vision is not common, certainly not in big-budget horror, and especially not from Blumhouse. The production house makes its bank from countless sequels and remakes, and relied on genre stalwart Leigh Whannell for their first two classic horror reworks (the brilliant Invisible Man and the somewhat disappointing Wolf Man).
The performances keep up with the film’s manic pace. Laia Costa is raw and heartbreaking as Larissa, a mother caring for her unrecognisable child, refusing to quit trying to reach her. Her scenes alone with Katie have a stillness that balances the film’s more chaotic moments. Jack Reynor brings that wide-eyed look of terror he perfected in Midsommar’s climax to father Charlie. He’s a man permanently braced for impact, keeping his grief a constant hum beneath the surface. As the horror escalates, he shifts from braced limbo to frantic protectiveness, emotionally embracing his loved ones in a tight-as-hell bearhug as everything around him shatters.
There’s strong support too. Verónica Falcón has an absolute blast as the grandmother, especially during a late twist that gives more than a nod to Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise. May Calamawy’s Egyptian detective Dalia is probably the closest we get to a classic Mummy character, traversing tombs to unravel the central mystery. Calamawy has the thankless task of folding in a lot of the exposition and mostly pulls it off through likeability alone. A version of this film that puts Dalia centre stage? I’d watch it in a heartbeat.
And then there’s Natalie Grace’s Katie. Her titular creature is all twisted limbs and birdlike head tilts. The make-up by veteran SFX artist Arjen Tuiten is spectacular. An unholy combination of Pet Sematary’s Zelda and The Exorcist’s Regan, she looks like a living wound but still manages to suggest a trapped, frightened child beneath the bandages. The performance would fall apart without that convincing humanity, and Grace makes Katie pitiable, repulsive, eerie and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same scene.
As he demonstrated in his similarly wild Evil Dead franchise addition, Cronin knows how to weaponise disgust. Few working horror directors are as committed to putting the human body through the wringer. Teeth, skin, throats, mouths - nothing is safe. There is one toenail clipping sequence that deserves its own warning label (reader, this old horror movie veteran looked away), and a funeral set piece tips into a full-on bad taste opera. It is grotesque and hilarious but staged with a confidence that means you easily forgive any excesses.
These scenes edge closer to Peter Jackson’s early splatterpunk efforts Bad Taste and Braindead than to any other horror film of this past decade, and I have no doubt that Cronin will one day be mentioned in the same breath as John Carpenter, Sam Raimi and David Cronenberg (the triumvirate of body horror). He’s able to flash a knowing, crooked smile without completely surrendering to the absurd, which is damn tricky to do. Too solemn and this material would collapse under the weight of its own misery...see this year’s Psycho Killer for an exercise in po-faced dullness. Too jokey, and the tragedy at the centre would suffer. Cronin gets that balance right often enough to keep his film on its feet, even when it starts wobbling.
And wobble it does in some beats. The gore becomes overwhelming, especially in the middle stretch, where the unwavering bloodshed tests the patience - and the stomach - of even the most hardened viewer. The mythology is somewhat conveniently simplistic: an archaeology professor helpfully pops up out of nowhere to provide an exposition dump, as does a VHS tape revealing an important ritual’s mechanics.
Ultimately, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is an impressive piece of studio horror, alive and bold in so ways many franchise resurrections aren’t. It swings hard and leaves a bloody fingerprint that won’t wash off easily. A fierce commentary on grief and parenthood that makes for a gleefully gory night at the movies. Occasionally ridiculous, often brilliant and never, ever boring. In other words, a Lee Cronin movie through and through.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in cinemas 17th April 2026.
