From Tomb to Terror, 'Lee Cronin’s The Mummy' Refuses to Rest

Welcome back, Cairo crew! It’s time for another resurrection. The enduring popularity of the Universal Monsters has provided fodder for continual reinvention in the cinematic zeitgeist for nearly a century, inviting a succession of formidable filmmakers to reinterpret these iconic figures through their own distinct artistic lenses. Frankenstein's monster, for instance, has been shaped by directors such as James Whale, Ishirō Honda, Kenneth Branagh and Guillermo del Toro. Similarly, Count Dracula has been reimagined by Tod Browning, Francis Ford Coppola and Robert Eggers.

Image via IMDb.

Among these figures, the Mummy stands out as a striking embodiment of colonialism, cultural intrusion, and forbidden knowledge – while also serving as an early patient zero for Gothic horror itself, with its supernatural (or seemingly supernatural) forces, obsession with death and desire and signature blend of dread and awe. The character has been interpreted by directors like Karl Freund, Terence Fisher and Stephen Sommers. Most recently, the figure has been iterated in a darker, more viscerally genre-driven form by Lee Cronin, an ideal moodsmith for this sort of undertaking. His attempt at an update provides both highs and lows.

The film traces the journey of journalist Charlie (Jack Reynor), whose young daughter Katie (Natalie Grace) vanishes without a trace into the desert, leaving an enduring rupture within the family. Eight years later, her sudden and inexplicable return initially appears to promise reconciliation and emotional restoration. However, this anticipated reunion is swiftly destabilised as the circumstances surrounding her reappearance give rise to unease and suspicion. What should signify closure instead unfolds into a deeply unsettling ordeal, in which the boundaries between recovery and terror become increasingly indistinct, transforming the family’s long-awaited reunion into a sustained psychological nightmare. 

For my money, Lee Cronin has emerged as one of the more energetic new voices in contemporary horror, from his debut The Hole in the Ground (2019) to his revitalisation of the Deadite franchise with Evil Dead Rise (2023). Consequently, when Universal Pictures announced a reboot of The Mummy with Cronin at the helm, I was excited by the prospect of a more nihilistic take on the source material.

Image via Warner Bros Pictures.

From an initial glance at the 134-minute reinterpretation, it seems to be a relatively effective horror experience. Cronin demonstrates a confident command of established tropes and practices, deploying them with enough precision and stylistic flair to allow this reboot to stand apart from many of its contemporaries. His directing ticks reveal a clear command of tightly controlled suspense-building sequences, which build methodically before culminating in moments of iconic visceral release. These climaxes frequently take the form of unflinching displays of gore that, despite my own well-developed tolerance for such imagery, still managed to provoke genuine reactions – whether that be startled, incredulous laughter or genuine provocation to look away. 

Not only does Cronin fully indulge and exaggerate his more sadistic sensibilities, but he also carries over a number of stylistic signatures that have been steadily emerging across his earlier work. I found myself increasingly won over as the film settled into a distinct visual and tonal rhythm – one that feels, at its most compelling, like a collision between the raw, corporeal brutality of Tobe Hooper and a heightened, maximalist visual grammar in the spirit of Sam Raimi.

The frequent use of split-diopter compositions, in particular, lends the frame a layered, destabilizing quality, allowing multiple planes of action to coexist in uneasy tension. Whether that be from reanimated family members as walking corpses with fragile, paper-thin skin or grainy VHS found footage of paranormal occult rituals, the collective result is a film that oscillates between formalism and outright sensory assault, where aesthetic excess and visceral horror feed into one another with perverse coherence.

Image via Warner Bros Pictures.

With that in mind, some of the previously noted Evil Dead carryover prevents the film from fully ascending into the upper tier of the macabre canon. As the film is backed by larger corporate production structures and the familiar imprint of high-profile producers, I couldn’t help but imagine the likes of Jason Blum and James Wan repeatedly asking, “Yes, but how cool does ‘Egyptian exorcist’ sound?” each time Cronin pitched his ideas.

As a result, much of the film feels as though it is precariously balanced on the line between genuine, conceptually rich engagement with established mummy mythology and a more commercially legible impulse to repackage familiar genre mechanics. The traditional tensions – science versus the supernatural, the fetishisation of scrolls, books, and curses, the archeological encounter with the unknowable past – are all present, yet they often feel secondary to a broader instinct to cannibalize the residue of Cronin’s previous work, particularly the “Deadite” grammar of his earlier films. The effect is less a clean reinvention of the mummy mythos than a horror palimpsest, where newly excavated ideas are continually overwritten by the twice-heated textures of recent iconography.

In this sense, the film feels more like a self-referential layering of genre detritus, where the mythic and the modern are continuously collapsed into one another, sometimes productively, but often at the expense of tonal and conceptual clarity. Between this, Send Help and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, this year’s shaping up to be a full-blown renaissance of the splatter, spunk, and spew. Good luck enjoying eggs after watching – you have been warned.

-Jack