LOS ANGELES, CA — “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” breaks from the franchise’s Egypt‑centric roots, reshaping it into an intimate, grief‑bound possession tale driven by a parasitic force that latches onto the living.
From the parental dread of “The Hole in the Ground” to the viscerally corporeal violence of “Evil Dead Rise,” Cronin has built a career on fractured families and the tensions that splinter them. He carries that instinct into “The Mummy,” letting horror seep into one family’s sanctuary and turn it into a crucible of rising dread, without the trappings of ancient tombs and sand‑swept spectacle.
Dim lights. Eerie stillness. A married couple braces. Then — a silhouette. A girl. Is she their long-missing daughter? Her reappearance is the moment the past refuses to stay buried.
The tale begins eight years earlier in Cairo, where 8-year-old Katie Cannon (Emily Mitchell) vanishes from her family’s garden — a loss that leaves her parents, Charlie (Jack Reynor), a news reporter, and his wife Larissa (Laia Costa), suspended in unresolved grief. The investigation falls to Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), a junior officer who takes the case seriously but finds no answers.
Years later, the case jolts back to life when a plane goes down over Egypt and investigators recover a sarcophagus from the wreckage. Inside, they find a teenage girl who matches Katie’s description — played by Natalie Grace — alive and bearing the same features, the same height, the same unaltered frame she had at eight.
The catatonic girl is released into the care of Charlie and Larissa, now living in New Mexico, though her unresponsive state offers no clarity about where she has been or how she survived. The discovery pulls Detective Zaki back into the case.
What follows is an evil presence threatening the Cannons’ inner sanctum, turning their lives into a waking nightmare — slow at first, with Katie’s flesh beginning to slough away in soft, gelatinous sheets. Then the violence erupts, plunging the family into murder and pandemonium, as if the walls, the stairs, the doors have become weapons in her hands.
Cronin’s fingerprints are unmistakable. The instincts that made “Evil Dead Rise” so unnerving — the splatter, the physical brutality, the kinetic, tactile horror — are redirected here without losing their charge. He lets dread seep in small, disquieting pulses before the film erupts into the same Deadite mayhem he’s known for.
That execution comes with a familiar lineage. Cronin pays homage to “The Exorcist” — the bedside vigils, the whispered pleas, the dread of a family orbiting a child who’s no longer entirely theirs — and draws on the slow-burn scare rhythms of the “Conjuring” films. With James Wan and Jason Blum involved as producers, those echoes feel intentional, folded into Cronin’s own fevered register.
Reynor carves Charlie with a bruised vulnerability he can’t quite hide beneath the hardened bravado of an investigative journalist — his composure holding even as his voice wavers. Costa brings a quieter intensity, her Larissa caught between fear and denial — her stares edged with impossible hope as she tries to reassure Katie. Together, they steady the film’s emotional stakes, inhabiting parents who are desperate to comprehend what has happened to their daughter.
But it’s Grace who becomes the film’s locus of unease. Her work is strikingly physical — the stiffness in her posture, the abruptness of her turns, the way she holds her limbs just a beat too long — all of it delivering the persistent dread the framing makes impossible to ignore.
The film’s most noticeable misstep arrives in the middle stretch, as its investigative backbone starts circling familiar beats and the emotional through line strains under a touch of melodrama — a combination that briefly slows the momentum just as the story is building toward its crescendo.
Meanwhile, the mythology, though compelling in outline, never fully coheres. Cronin sketches a supernatural system — a parasitic force bound to grief — but the film offers only fragments of its origins and rules, leaving the larger stakes underdeveloped.
Ultimately, even with its structural and conceptual shortcomings, Cronin’s command of atmosphere and his grounded sensibility deliver a reinvention that feels purposeful, not perfunctory, anchored by nuanced performances. And the film’s shift toward a grief-driven, parasitic interpretation of “The Mummy” lends the material a welcome spark of originality.