Lee Cronin's The Mummy: Fiendish Yet Imitative
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- Lee Cronin's "The Mummy" opened April 17, 2026 via Warner Bros/New Line Cinema as the Irish filmmaker's third feature, rated R and running 2 hours 14 minutes, reimagining Universal's 1932 franchise.
- The plot centers on the Cannon family—BBC journalist Charlie (Jack Reynor) and nurse Larissa (Laia Costa) in Cairo—whose daughter Katie is abducted and, eight years later, returns mummified but alive, driving a story that blends Exorcist-style possession horror with a Se7en-style detective thread.
- The review calls the film "fiendish yet imitative," praising its gnarliness and Cronin's recurring interest in "the rot at the heart of the nuclear family" while faulting its protracted runtime, mismatched tones, and failure to land scares.
- Cronin's influences are flagged as sitting "squarely on his sleeve," with the reviewer noting Raimi-esque bleak humor, defenestration, and bug imagery that echo his prior work on Evil Dead Rise.
- Veronica Falcón is singled out as "quietly the film's biggest breath of fresh air" for her turn as Larissa's hyper-religious Catholic mother Carmen.
- May Calamawy's Detective Zaki subplot is dismissed as "tedious and mostly unnecessary," and an archaeology professor (Mark Mitchinson) who offers key insight is introduced and then dropped without payoff.
Why it matters: Cronin earned genre credibility with Evil Dead Rise, so a muted critical reception for this high-profile legacy-IP reboot—clocking in at 2 hr 14 min and weighed down by disparate Exorcist and Se7en borrowings—shows Warner Bros/New Line gambled on a distinctive auteur voice for a 1932-vintage franchise and got a film that neither advances Cronin's signature family-rot theme nor delivers consistent scares.
