LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY (2026)

New streaming on HBO MAX from New Line Cinema, Atomic Monster, and
Blumhouse Productions!
Directed/Written by Lee Cronin.
Check out the
trailer here!!

Eight years after Katie was abducted, her parents Charlie and Larissa (played by Jack Reynor and Laia Costa) are stunned to learn that a plane carrying a sarcophagus crashes in the jungle and inside, swaddled in ceremonial wrappings, is their missing daughter. But Katie (Natalie Grace) is not the same carefree little girl she was when she was abducted. Catatonic and yet in decent physical condition, the doctors tell Charlie and Larissa that the best thing they can do for Katie is place her into familiar surroundings. So, they take the wheelchair-bound Katie home to recover. But something is wrong with Katie. Something very, very wrong. And it involves an ancient demon and a ritual that needs to be completed every lifetime.

For some reason, Lee Cronin’s THE MUMMY didn’t connect with audiences when it hit theaters earlier this year. I think on a surface level, this is because the film isn’t really your typical mummy movie. There is no shambling corpse wrapped in gauze, extending one arm and relentlessly pursuing the protagonist. But that’s not really what Brendan Frasier ‘s was all about either and that was highly popular. But since that was a high adventure horror for the masses, I guess it gets a pass for some reason. <br
No, Lee Cronin made a hardcore possession movie, more akin to THE EXORCIST and HEREDITARY. And those films, as good as they are, do not have mass appeal. It’s a subject for another video, but both THE EXORCIST and HEREDITARY are extremely slow burns. And I can’t count the times I’ve heard people complain about how boring those films are. The lack of attention span infecting audiences today is depressing.

Anyway, Lee Cronin didn’t make a slow burner, but I think the fact that he made a possession movie with the title of a monster from another subgenre is another reason why this film rubbed so many people the wrong way. It’s like calling your movie THE WEREWOLF and having zombies walking around. I get it. False advertising and all. It also didn’t help things that rumor had it that James Wan walked out of a premiere of the film, which didn’t help early buzz.

And it’s a shame because Cronin delivered a harrowing and often quite disturbing tale about recovering from extreme trauma and attempting to find a path back to some sense of normalcy. What touched me deeply in this film is that the Katie her parents knew was utterly destroyed and in her place is a completely different person. A stranger with Katie’s face. Her innocence lost is lost forever. And how does a parent cope with that? Beyond the bugs, the body horror, and the floating children, that’s what this film is all about and Cronin can tap into that raw, uncomfortable feeling extremely well in this movie. THE MUMMY surprised me at how well it handled this delicate subject matter. Now, I seriously doubt someone with Katie’s condition would be released and sent home. I think some kind of care facility would have been more appropriate as she is completely tore up from the floor up. Still, if she didn’t come home, there wouldn’t be a movie and they try to explain her return home away with the fact that Larissa is a nurse, so she can care for her, I guess. But honestly, at least there is a character, Charlie, who voices that they might not be prepared to deal with this.

The body horror is thick and intense. The toenail scene. The grandma scene. The scorpion scene. All of them potent displays of body wrongness. The film goes out of its way to nauseate and never lets up. It also doesn’t give two shits about its characters. No one is safe. Not the kids. Not the elderly. No one. And while the toenail scene is probably the most iconic, the wake scene after a family member dies is both horrifying and of the blackest humor. It is a cacophony of violence and the supernatural reminiscent of the in-your-face terror of DEAD ALIVE.

While the ending is satisfying, I do feel as if it sort of cheats at its own established rules. The end also wraps things up a little too nicely for my tastes, playing it somewhat safe at the end of an otherwise ferocious story.

That said, the cast do their jobs well. Laia Costa is annoying as she turns a blind eye to all the terrors going on and is just happy to get her daughter back. It’s an infuriating part to play, but Costa commits to it. Jack Reynor is likable in a laid-back Seth Rogan sort of way. And he, out of all the other members of the cast, speaks the truth or what everyone is thinking but is afraid of saying it. Natalie Grace as Katie is terrifying, though much of that is due to makeup, CGI, and extreme closeups.

From what I had heard about THE MUMMY, I was preparing for something awful. But it worked for me. It plays much more like a sequel to Cronin’s EVIL DEAD RISE than a mummy movie. This is a brutal movie and not for the casual horror fan. It’s emotionally rough and visually nauseating for big chunks of the film. And I ultimately think because Cronin delivered such a potently disgusting and terrifying movie that many expecting a mummy movie like one has seen before were knocked on their asses by this truly different take on mummified monstrosities. I think you’re going to be shocked at the harrowing horror that awaits you in Lee Cronin’s THE MUMMY.