The Mummy remains one of the most iconic figures of the classic movie monster era. For nearly 95 years, the character has been reimagined through horror, romance, and action-adventure, evolving with each generation without ever fully losing its mythic power. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy recognizes that any new take must do more than reinvent the monster. It also has to leave room to engage with the story’s cultural roots in a way that feels thoughtful, grounded, and free of the outdated stereotypes that have often shaped past depictions.
Set in modern-day Egypt, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy centers on Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor), an international journalist reporting on a devastating drought affecting local farmers. Even amid the upheaval, there is reason for the Cannon family to look ahead, as Charlie is offered a reporting job in New York, giving him the chance to bring his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), daughter Katie (Natalie Grace), and son Sebastian (Shylo Molina) home. But when Katie suddenly goes missing, Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) eventually contacts the Cannons with shocking news: Katie has been found alive after being locked in a sarcophagus for eight years, though the circumstances surrounding her recovery are deeply disturbing and far from the miracle reunion the family had hoped for.
Katie is malnourished and trapped in a “locked-in” mental state, and while she is physically strong and medically stable, she is unable to fully communicate with her family in any recognizable way.
Rather than revive The Mummy as a large-scale action-horror spectacle, Cronin reshapes it into a story about grief, guilt, and the emotional violence that trauma can inflict on a family. He gives us a reason to care about the Cannons before their lives begin to unravel, presenting them as warm, believable, and deeply connected. Sebastian pokes fun at his father’s journalistic hand gestures, Katie teases her brother’s taste in pizza, and Charlie’s love for his wife is felt in the quiet excitement surrounding the child they are about to welcome into the world.
Of course, all of that unravels when Katie is kidnapped. While Egyptian authorities believe that Charlie did something to his own daughter. Charlie expects empathy and urgent action, yet encounters a more distant, hierarchical investigative culture that initially mistrusts his account. Naturally, Charlie is angered by such accusations, but is ultimately powerless to do anything about it when leads grow colder, and the investigation goes nowhere.
That emotional grounding is what allows Cronin to turn Katie’s return into something more than a supernatural hook, transforming it instead into a painful test of what love, responsibility, and caregiving look like under impossible circumstances. When Katie returns home, she is no longer the same child who vanished. That change is not defined solely by the years she was missing, but by the physical and psychological trauma of what was done to her, including the rituals she endured and the years she spent confined within a sarcophagus. She may look older, but Cronin is more interested in how deeply that suffering has fractured her sense of self and the family’s ability to reach her.
Katie’s return is where Cronin’s version of The Mummy reveals what kind of horror story it actually wants to be. Instead of treating her recovery as a straightforward supernatural reveal, the film uses it to deepen the family’s emotional rupture. Even after relocating to New Mexico, the Cannons keep a room for Katie, underscoring how much her absence remains in their lives. When she finally returns, what they want most is to make up for all of the lost time. This also includes introducing Katie to their youngest, Maude.
Larissa clings to her daughter, while her mother, played by Verónica Falcón, tries to restore her granddaughter’s beauty and sense of normalcy. Yet even those gestures of tenderness curdle into horror. Katie’s body appears to be covered in extra layers of skin that, when peeled away, create some of the film’s most viscerally disgusting imagery, made even more unsettling by the wet, squelching sound design. Even something as ordinary as a pedicure is transformed into nightmare fuel in a scene that may leave viewers thinking twice before booking their next appointment.
What makes that body horror especially effective is that Cronin does not frame it as a simple curse unfolding in real time, but as something closer to an illness. Katie’s peeling skin, physical deterioration, and disturbing tics are horrifying not only because they are grotesque, but because they echo the helplessness of watching a loved one suffer in ways you cannot immediately understand or fix. In that sense, The Mummy transforms bodily decay into something more emotionally invasive, forcing the Cannons to respond not to a distant monster but to a presence that is among them.
Cronin avoids a clean full-frame monster reveal, instead fixating on jagged nails, peeling layers, and skin that looks strangely ill-fitted, as though it has been wrapped back onto Katie’s body and allowed to fold and settle in all the wrong places. The effect is both disturbing and distancing as the fragmented framing is grotesque enough to make the audience curl their fingers and toes, while the refusal to show Katie in full preserves the terrible intimacy of what only the Cannons are forced to confront.
The Mummy is a strange but compelling mix of tones. It is tragic, frightening, occasionally funny, and often deeply gross, moving between family drama, body horror, and emotional devastation in ways that should feel at odds but mostly hold together thanks to its proper bindings from Cronin’s vision.
What makes Lee Cronin’s The Mummy stand out is the way it engages Egyptian culture with more care than many of its cinematic predecessors. From its music to its smaller everyday details, the film recognizes that a figure as globally iconic as the Mummy cannot be divorced from the culture that shaped it. That attention to authenticity is reflected in the casting of Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy and Egyptian actress May Elghety, whose presence helps ground the story in a more lived-in, credible reality. As a result, the film’s Egyptian characters do not feel like background texture or symbolic markers surrounding the Cannon family, but essential parts of the storytelling itself.
May Calamawy emerges as one of the film’s quieter standouts, bringing a quiet assurance to Zaki that makes the character feel immediately credible. Rather than playing her as a stock investigator or procedural functionary, Calamawy gives her a moral steadiness, emotional intelligence, and restraint that allow even small moments of hesitation or defiance to carry real weight. As a police officer working within a broken system without allowing herself to be fully defined by it, Zaki becomes one of the film’s most grounded and humane figures, with Calamawy gradually revealing her discomfort, doubt, and growing sense of responsibility in ways that feel both subtle and deeply affecting. She wants to give the Cannons the closure they deserve while also breaking the glass ceiling that plagues many precincts around the globe.
Cronin subverts the traditional monster-origin story by refusing to recycle the Mummy as a figure explained only by ancient curse mythology. Instead, he filters the monster through his own Catholic understanding of faith, a more grounded engagement with Egyptian culture, and the language of sickness, trauma, and caregiving, turning the Mummy into something that feels at once spiritual, cultural, and painfully human. By making audiences care about this family early on, Cronin ensures that Katie’s transformation registers as more than a shocking monster reveal. It becomes emotionally resonant, tapping into the desperate hope that anyone would cling to if given the chance to bring back a missing loved one, only to be confronted with the unbearable reality that what returns may be forever changed.
explained only by ancient curse mythology. Instead, he filters the monster through his own Catholic understanding of faith, a more grounded engagement with Egyptian culture, and the language of sickness, trauma, and caregiving, turning the Mummy into something that feels at once spiritual, cultural, and painfully human. By making audiences care about this family early on, he ensures that Katie’s transformation registers as more than a shocking monster reveal. It becomes emotionally resonant, tapping into the desperate hope anyone would cling to if given the chance to bring back a missing loved one, only to be confronted with the unbearable reality that what returns may be forever changed.
In doing so, Cronin delivers a horror film that feels both systemic and deeply emotional, suggesting that what haunts us most is not an ancient curse, but the unresolved grief, institutional failure, and human cruelty that allow such horror to take root. By weaving together family loss and grounded horror, The Mummy becomes a haunting reinvention of an iconic monster, one that feels as emotionally bruising as it is viscerally unsettling.
9/10
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in theaters tomorrow.
