Studio:   New Line Cinema/Blumhouse
Director: Lee Cronin
Writer:   Lee Cronin
Producer: James Wan, Jason Blum, John Keville
Stars:    Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Shylo Molina, Billie Roy, Emily Mitchell, Hayat Kamille, May Elghety, Husam Chadat, Veronica Falcon, Natalie Grace

Review Score:

Summary:

Eight years after disappearing in Egypt, a young girl unexpectedly reunites with her family, who must unravel the mystery of her frightening demonic possession.

Synopsis:

Gamal Khalil and his wife, who is known only as “The Magician,” return home to their nectarine farm in Egypt with their daughter Layla and two sons Jabari and Tariq to discover Layla’s pet bird suffering from a bizarre illness. Immediately worried, Gamal and The Magician descend into a secret chamber beneath a small pyramid hidden outside their home. There, the two of them check on a sarcophagus whose mummy suddenly resurrects and kills Gamal once its sarcophagus lid is opened.

Working as a TV reporter in Cairo while living with his pregnant wife Larissa, their son Sebastian, and their daughter Katie, American Charlie Cannon becomes concerned when he discovers a stash of Tut’s Treasures candy bar wrappers indicating someone has been secretly befriending Katie. Outside in the family’s garden, The Magician, who knows Katie through the girl’s friendship with her daughter Layla, clandestinely gives Katie a nectarine. The Magician recites an incantation that causes a beetle to emerge from the fruit and crawl into Katie, who begins succumbing to supernatural possession. Attempting to catch his daughter’s secret friend in the act, Charlie ends up chasing The Magician through a sandstorm as she runs away cradling Katie.

Unable to recover Katie, Charlie and Larissa report their daughter’s disappearance to the police. The case is assigned to Detective Dalia Zaki, a newcomer to the Missing Persons division. Although Zaki sympathizes with the parents, her dismissive superior Detective Ismail implies Charlie and Larissa may be suspects as he begins mishandling the investigation. Charlie and Larissa eventually return home to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to raise their new daughter Maud alongside Sebastian as well as Larissa’s mother Carmen Santiago.

Eight years later, a small plane piloted by Jabari and Tariq Khalil crashes in an Egyptian desert. Jabari and Tariq die gruesomely while the sarcophagus they were transporting is examined by two academics who discover a mummy inside. The academics unwrap the mummy to find Katie, who spontaneously reanimates after a beetle crawls out of her mouth.

Charlie and Larissa are summoned to Cairo to meet with Bryce Vogel of the U.S. Embassy and Doctor El-Sayed, who warns the couple that Katie is not only gnarled in appearance, but also catatonic and behaving bizarrely. Detective Zaki tells Charlie and Larissa that Katie was found inside a sarcophagus aboard a crashed plane. Charlie links Zaki to her predecessor’s failed investigation from eight years earlier, but Zaki promises to do a better job of finding out what happened to Katie.

Charlie and Larissa bring Katie home to Albuquerque. When Carmen tries to pray over the girl, Katie suddenly attacks, then violently contorts until Larissa sedates her.

Strange noises in the walls wake the family during the night. Charlie and Larissa find Katie scurrying around eating beetles, which they force her to vomit. When Charlie leaves the next morning to take Sebastian and Maud to school, the three of them see snarling coyotes stalking outside their gate.

While grooming Katie and cutting her nails with Carmen, Larissa inadvertently tears a large strip of flesh off of Katie’s leg. Meanwhile, Charlie discovers a strange substance rotting the floor beneath a rug in Katie’s bedroom.

With their daughter’s behavior and physical condition worsening, Charlie suggests finding specialized care for Katie. Larissa refuses. The two of them blame each other for what happened to Katie regarding her “secret friend” in their Cairo garden.

By repeatedly biting her teeth together, Katie uses Morse code to spell out the name “Layla” to her father. Charlie reports the name to Detective Zaki, who asks if anyone by that name ever tried to contact him regarding Katie’s disappearance. This prompts Charlie to dig up a sympathy card from Layla Khalil personally apologizing for what happened to her friend Katie.

In Egypt, Detective Zaki connects Layla Kahlil to her family’s nectarine farm. Zaki remembers a nectarine was found at the crime scene where Katie disappeared.

Charlie finds hieroglyphics written inside the strip of flesh that came from Katie’s leg. Recognizing the strips as belonging to a mummy, Charlie takes the hieroglyphs to archeology expert Professor Bixler for translation. Bixler eventually reports that the glyphs discuss “The Nazmaranian,” an evil entity that destroyed families and communities until it was trapped through an ancient ritual and bound with words of protection.

Katie’s possession spreads to her younger sister Maud, who supernaturally levitates outside Katie’s bedroom door. Overcome by the entity, Maud later speaks obscenities at a schoolteacher.

Detective Zaki investigates the Khalil family’s nectarine farm, where she discovers the hidden chamber where the sarcophagus was kept beneath the small pyramid. The Magician suddenly rushes at Zaki with a knife. Zaki wounds her with a gunshot.

Zaki spots The Magician’s daughter Layla fleeing the farm. Zaki follows Layla and catches her digging up a box that contains a VHS tape labelled “Katie.” On the tape, The Magician explains how dark signs showed her the time had come to re-contain their ancient family secret with their 82nd mummification ritual. As the family’s current first-born child, the responsibility for containing the demon Nazmaranian fell to The Magician, who made this recording as a document for descendants to know what to do when their time came to transfer the demon from a spent vessel to a freshly prepared host, which can be any live human, although an innocent child is identified as working best. The tape concludes with the ritual used to bind the demon to Katie.

Carmen prays over Katie once again. Katie viciously bites her grandmother, taunts Carmen in a demonic voice, levitates her while she is supernaturally strangled by a rosary, then launches the woman through a window. Carmen crashes onto Charlie’s car as he returns home with Sebastian and Maud, who laughs in the backseat. The other family members are horrified to see a pack of coyotes maul Carmen to death.

Detective Zaki questions Layla, whose tongue was cut out by her mother, about her family’s involvement with Katie. Layla warns that Katie was never supposed to leave her sarcophagus, but when flooding threatened their farm, her brothers were forced to move the box via the plane that ultimately crashed.

The Cannons host a wake for Carmen at their house. While Katie attempts to spread the possession to her brother, Maud pulls out her teeth. Maud then unstitches Carmen’s lips and puts the woman’s dentures in her mouth, horrifying her parents with a sinister smile. At the same time, Katie crawls through a hole torn in her floor to get into Carmen’s coffin and gnaw at her corpse, shocking the mourners. Upstairs, Sebastian starts repeatedly bashing his head in his bedroom.

Detective Zaki comes to Albuquerque to show Charlie and Larissa the videotape. Meanwhile, Sebastian helps his sister remove her flesh and mummy wrappings as she becomes fully possessed.

A supernatural sandstorm swells throughout the house as Katie attacks the adults. Sebastian hits his mother with a baseball bat, but Larissa eventually subdues him. Carmen’s resurrected corpse attacks Zaki with a scorpion that punctures Zaki’s throat before Carmen is also subdued.

Zaki crawls to Charlie to make a stand against Katie. After apologizing to his wife, Charlie instructs Zaki to repeat the incantation they heard on the videotape. Despite the injury to her throat, Zaki recites the words, causing the entity to transfer from Katie to Charlie. Charlie and Katie both collapse on the floor. All three Cannon children return to normal.

In the aftermath, Larissa and Katie keep Charlie chained inside a large trunk in their basement. Using Morse code, Charlie tells his family he loves them.

Larissa calls Detective Zaki with a special request regarding her husband. Zaki ultimately helps Larissa sneak into the remote Egyptian cell where The Magician is imprisoned. Larissa injects The Magician with a sedative. Zaki then brings in Charlie in a wheelchair. The two women begin the ritual to transfer the demon from Charlie to The Magician.

Review:

“Lee Cronin” isn’t exactly a household name, which explains why more than a few people scrunched their eyebrows when Blumhouse’s 2026 incarnation of “The Mummy” was formally retitled “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” a move some interpreted as possibly pretentious while others wondered if the movie’s marketers wishfully imagined “Lee Cronin” had brand recognition capable of bringing butts to theater seats. Prior to “The Mummy,” Cronin only directed two other feature films: A24’s 2019 thriller “The Hole in the Ground” (review here) and 2023’s “Evil Dead Rise” (review here). The latter was well received, but not so much that Cronin became synonymous with the franchise. When someone thinks of “Evil Dead,” they likely think of either its creator Sam Raimi or its longtime star Bruce Campbell. Some fans might even add the director of the 2013 remake, Fede Alvarez, meaning Cronin doesn’t even crack the top three people associated with the IP.

In actuality, “Lee Cronin’s” was almost certainly added to “The Mummy” to avoid conflict with Universal’s plan to resurrect its same-named, Brendan Fraser-led series that began in 1999. New Line Cinema distributed this version of “The Mummy,” but Blumhouse maintains a valuable partnership with Universal in its other endeavors, so having two competing mummy movies confusing general audiences who don’t know the difference between them isn’t in the best business interests of anyone involved.

Alternatively, cynics might tease that, since early word of mouth wasn’t particularly praise-filled, perhaps “Lee Cronin’s” prefaces “The Mummy” so fingers would know where to point. Don’t like the movie’s peculiar take on mummy mythology? Well, don’t blame Blumhouse or James Wan’s Atomic Monster. Blame Lee Cronin, because this is all his doing!

For all the attention “Lee Cronin’s” gets regarding its inclusion and what it’s worth as currency, “The Mummy” portion of the title comes with a fair share of questions too. Namely, does “The Mummy” even accurately identify the movie’s monster? Even though some of the story takes place in Egypt and involves a corpse in a sarcophagus, “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” plays far closer to a routine demonic possession yarn than anything that could be considered adjacent to Imhotep, Kharis, or typical trappings of traditional mummy movies.

You might end up becoming as stiff as a mummy yourself while waiting through the film’s lengthy first act, which seems to last longer than some movies’ entire runtimes. The story starts eight years ago in Egypt with a family of five coming home to their farm to find something amiss. The kids stay behind while mother and father investigate a secret chamber below a small pyramid hidden on their property. In the first ill-advised action someone performs out of complete foolishness, the couple opens a sleek sarcophagus stashed in the underground lair, inadvertently unleashing the horror that had been slumbering inside.

Next, move across Cairo a short way to meet The Cannon Family. Charlie brought his pregnant wife Larissa, son Sebastian, and daughter Katie to live overseas while he works as a TV news reporter. Unbeknownst to her parents, Katie struck up a secret friendship with the other family, which is how she ends up a pawn in a plot to control the creature that just came out of its coffin. Katie’s subsequent disappearance attracts the attention of an upstart detective, Daria Zaki, although her superior’s incorrect suspicions regarding what happened make the case go cold almost immediately.

Fast forward to the present day, or 20 minutes into the movie. The Cannons are back in Albuquerque living with their new daughter Maud and Larissa’s mother Carmen. Meanwhile, two men crash a plane in an Egyptian desert where a boy on a bicycle finds the sarcophagus, which currently contains Katie wrapped up in bandages. A couple of academic types examine her body and are shocked when the girl spontaneously jolts back to life despite her corpse-like qualities. A doctor, an ambassador, and the detective from earlier summon Charlie and Larissa to come claim their long-lost daughter. They do, and then they bring her back to America, hopeful for a recovery even though Katie is grotesquely deformed, mute, and behaving more and more like Regan MacNeil with each passing day.

“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is 40 minutes old at this point and only just now switching out of its introductory gear. We don’t yet know what happened to Katie, why she was involved in the first place, or how she came to be on that airplane. Those mysteries will be solved in due time through structured exposition dumps delivered via the usual suspects: a Professor Know-It-All who translates hieroglyphics identifying the evil entity inside Katie, a recovered videotape that conveniently recorded the ritual that transformed the girl, and a confession from someone at the source of the Cairo-centered conspiracy.

In between piecemeal explanations for what’s going on, “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” fulfills basic horror functions with signature possession scenes such as levitating, contorting backwards, crawling on ceilings, projectile vomiting, and other supernatural shenanigans, all while family members oddly react as though Katie is merely getting over a common cold. Hard to blame anyone, really; everyone is written to have either none or one discernible trait for some of the hollowest characterizations imaginable, so they’re not quite brimming with common sense. And since the film still feels the need to fill two hours after spending a third of that time on a prologue, Katie’s curse also spreads to her siblings for more mildly mummy-ish madness.

As a mummy movie, “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is decidedly meh for having too little to do with its titular terror. As a demonic possession movie, “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is still mostly mediocre, although it has a couple of compelling visual designs and quick pops of gruesome shocks to be a serviceable, yet inconsequential, piece of average genre ephemera. The question left for the future is what effect, if any, this film will have on the perceived value of Lee Cronin’s name. Perhaps there’ll come an answer by the time he releases a werewolf movie, presumptively titled “Lee Cronin’s Dracula.”

Review Score: 55