Crew
Director/Screenplay – Lee Cronin, Producers – Jason Blum, John Keville & James Wan, Photography – Dave Garbett, Music – Stephen McKeon, Visual Effects Supervisor – Russell Bowen, Visual Effects – BeloFX (Supervisor – Blake Anderson), Cinesite (Supervisor – Nathalie Girard) & Elephant Goldfish (Supervisor – Fred Burdy), Special Effects Supervisor – Terry Palmer, Makeup Effects/Prosthetic Effects – Arjen LLC (Supervisor – Arjen Tuiten), Prosthetics Designer – Matthew Smith, Production Design – Nick Bassett. Production Company – New Line Cinema/Atomic Monster/Blumhouse.
Cast
Jack Reynor (Charlie Cannon), Laia Costa (Larissa Cannon), May Calamawy (Detective Dalia Zaki), Natalie Grace (Katie Cannon), Shylo Molina (Sebastian Cannon), Billie Roy (Maud Cannon), Veronica Falcon (Carmen Santiago), Hayat Kamille (The Magician), May Elghety (Layla Khalil), Mark Mitchinson (Professor Bixler), Emily Mitchell (Young Katie Cannon), Husam Chadat (Detective Ismail)
Plot
Charlie Cannon has relocated to Cairo along with his wife Larissa and children where he is working as a journalist for a US tv network. His daughter Katie is abruptly abducted by a mystery woman. The Egyptian police are no help in locating her and blame Charlie. Eight years later, Charlie and family have relocated to Albuquerque. They then receive news that a plane has crashed in the Aswan area and Katie has been found in the wreckage inside a three-thousand-year-old basalt sarcophagus the plane was transporting. Katie is brought back to the US but proves to be changed – non-speaking, her body deformed, she violent and self-harming in her actions. Charlie soon finds her unmanageable and this causes conflict with Larissa. Katie also exerts a supernatural influence over the other children. Back in Cairo, Detective Dalia Zaki pursues leads and uncovers the people who kept Katie encased in the sarcophagus and realises they did so to imprison an ancient demon known as The Nasmaranian.
The mummy film has been with us ever since Universal’s The Mummy (1932) with Boris Karloff. This was a subtle and effective genre classic but the Universal sequels that followed – The Mummy’s Hand (1940), The Mummy’s Tomb (1942), The Mummy’s Ghost (1944) and The Mummy’s Curse (1944) – turned the character into a dull, shuffling bandaged-wrapped figure, before the series’ ignominious end with Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955). UK’s Hammer Films conducted a vibrant remake with The Mummy (1959), but their subsequent mummy films failed to escape the B movie curse. Outside the English-speaking world, the mummy’s career path was well and truly on a long downward spiral to B programmer status. Universal conducted a substantial big-budget reboot with the effects and spectacle driven The Mummy (1999) and sequels starring Brendan Fraser, which the public now seems to think is the legitimate Mummy film. (For a more detailed listing of films see Mummy Films).
I was puzzled to see the film was being promoted as Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (or technically if you go by the order that the words appear on the opening credits The Lee Cronin’s Mummy). My first response to this was “Lee who?” A quick check on the name reminded me that Lee Cronin is the Irish director who made the quite good The Hole in the Ground (2019) and then the mainstream release of Evil Dead Rise (2023). The point I would make here is that I consider myself fairly in the know when it comes to regular genre directors. If Cronin doesn’t even immediately register on my seasoned genre radar, it is a name that sure as heck isn’t going to mean anything to the great unwashed public out there. Placing your name on a film is something that sets a definitive authorial stamp on a film but it requires that people have some identification with the name. The main reason for Cronin’s name being appended appears to have been at producer James Wan’s behest as a way to differentiate this mummy film from the Brendan Fraser-starring The Mummy films.
A few years ago, we had a failed attempt by Universal to launch the Dark Universe series and revive their Famous Monsters, which went down in flames after the flops of Dracula Untold (2014) and in particular their version of The Mummy (2017). The interesting thing is that Blumhouse appears to have taken up that mantle and made their own stealth Dark Universe series of sorts with The Invisible Man (2020) and Wolf Man (2025). This could easily be their take on The Mummy. You can’t really consider any of these remakes so much as just films that repurpose the titles of classics. And it takes a considerable stretch of the imagination to ever think that Blumhouse might be able to build any kind of shared universe out of these takes on characters.
In one respect, the whole issue about calling the film Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a non-issue. For the very simple reason that the film features no mummy as such. At least in the sense that we understand a mummy film as involving a sinister character wrapped in bandages shuffling across the screen searching for their eternal love reincarnated, something that became fairly de rigeur for the genre after the Universal sequels. If anything, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has its ancestry in the alternate take on the mummy story that came in Bram Stoker The Jewel of the Seven Stars (1903) – multiply filmed as Hammer’s Blood of the Mummy’s Tomb (1971), The Awakening (1980) and others – which is more of a reincarnation/possession story than anything involving bandage-enwrapped shufflers.
There is no mummy as such in the film. There is the character of Katie who becomes mummified but that’s not quite the same, particularly in the way the film plays it out. In fact, strip away all the elements of Ancient Egyptian occult and what we have is not much more than a run through the playbook established by The Exorcist (1973). There are uncanny familiarities between the two films – the child who suddenly starts developing a cracked face, begins levitating, vomiting over people and causing other supernatural phenomena then escalating to killing people; the frazzled and stressed parents trying to deal with this; the tracing of all this to an ancient demon from the Middle East. About the only thing we don’t get is an extended climactic scene where people try to exorcise the demon.
You cannot deny that Lee Cronin develops some creepy effect with Katie scuttling along on ceilings and being found devouring scorpions and even the flesh of the dead grandmother. Eventually though, at a two and a quarter hour runtime (134 minutes), the film starts to blur into much of a muchness – there are surprisingly few of the parade of jumpshocks or grotesqueries that stick around in memory afterwards. And some of the scenes with the other children being possessed and the grandmother resurrected just feel like they are doing nothing except extruding the running time. It might well have worked as a much tighter effort than that. It might also have worked if it had gone with a different title other than The Mummy and dissociated itself with the baggage and audience expectation that comes with the genre.
Jason Blum and his Blumhouse production company have produced a number of other genre films including:- Hamlet (2000), Paranormal Activity (2007) and sequels, Insidious (2010) and sequels, Tooth Fairy (2010), The Bay (2012), The Lords of Salem (2012), The River (tv series, 2012), Sinister (2012) and sequel, Dark Skies (2013), Oculus (2013), The Purge (2013) and sequels, the tv mini-series Ascension (2014), Creep (2014), Jessabelle (2014), Mercy (2014), Mockingbird (2014), Not Safe for Work (2014), Ouija (2014) and sequel, 13 Sins (2014), The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014), Unfriended/Cybernatural (2014), Area 51 (2015), The Boy Next Door (2015), Curve (2015), The Gallows (2015), The Gift (2015), Jem and the Holograms (2015), The Lazarus Effect (2015), Martyrs (2015), Visions (2015), The Visit (2015), The Darkness (2016), Hush (2016), Incarnate (2016), The Veil (2016), Viral (2016), Amityville: The Awakening (2017), Get Out (2017), Happy Death Day (2017), The Keeping Hours (2017), Split (2017), Stephanie (2017), Bloodline (2018), Cam (2018), Delirium (2018), Family Blood (2018)(2018)(2018), Halloween (2018), Seven in Heaven (2018), Truth or Dare (2018), Upgrade (2018), Black Christmas (2019), Ma (2019), Prey (2019), Don’t Let Go (2019), Sweetheart (2019), Black Box (2020), The Craft: Legacy (2020), Evil Eye (2020), Fantasy Island (2020), Freaky (2020), The Hunt (2020), The Invisible Man (2020), Nocturne (2020), You Should Have Left (2020), Black As Night (2021), The Black Phone (2021), Dashcam (2021), Firestarter (2022), M3gan (2022), Mr Harrigan’s Phone (2022), Nanny (2022), Soft & Quiet (2022), Run Sweetheart Run (2022), Sick (2022), They/Them (2022), Torn Hearts (2022), Unhuman (2022), The Visitor (2022), The Exorcist: Believer (2023), Five Nights at Freddy’s (2023), There’s Something Wrong With the Children (2023), Totally Killer (2023), Unseen (2023), Afraid (2024), Imaginary (2024), Night Swim (2024), Speak No Evil (2024), Obsession (2025), Wolf Man (2025) and The Woman in the Yard (2025).
Trailer here