We have to get this out of the way first because Blumhouse literally had to make an announcement: this is not a sequel, reboot, or requel of the Brendan Fraser one. This is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, and that naming choice matters.
Lee Cronin is the Irish filmmaker who blew up after Evil Dead Rise, and he’s currently executive producing Evil Dead Burn (coming in July). His style carried over into this film, which makes sense and also kind of does not.
Meaghan said it best:
This was kind of an Evil Dead movie.
Honestly, once you watch the trailer with that framing, you cannot unsee it. Arthur thought the trailer promised fucked up shit, and it delivered on that front.
What neither of us expected was how much the possession elements would take the wheel. This is the latest piece in Blumhouse’s ongoing effort to stitch the Dark Universe back together after it fell apart (Wolf Man was so-so, Invisible Man was great, Frankenstein worked really well), and The Mummy IP was next in line.
Our takeaway going in: this horror movie has hype, gore, and atmosphere. Our takeaway coming out: somewhere around a five out of ten. Mid road. Good impact, not quite what we expected.
If you are wondering if you should watch it or check out something else, go to our “what horror movie to watch” picker. 4 quick questions, hand-picked horror movies for you.
The Cannon Family and a Crypt in the Desert
The setup is ripped straight from the trailer. A journalist’s young daughter disappears in Egypt. Eight years later, she comes back. What should be a joyful reunion turns into a living nightmare. That’s the movie. That’s also the trailer, almost beat for beat.
The family at the center is the Cannons. Charlie (Jack Reynor, who you probably remember as the terrible boyfriend in Midsommar) and Larissa (Laia Costa) are living in Cairo when their daughter Katie is kidnapped from the backyard during a sandstorm. Arthur had one complaint about that sequence: “I can’t believe they didn’t play the Darude Sandstorm music during that.” We know… We’re sorry.
Fast forward eight years, and the family has relocated to Albuquerque, where Charlie works a behind-the-scenes job at a small news outlet. Then the embassy calls. Katie has been found inside a sarcophagus that fell out of a plane crash. She is alive. She also, as Meaghan put it, looks like a deadite.
At its core, the story is about an ancient demon that needs a human host to be contained. A family of magicians (going back generations) has been the keeper of this demon, cycling through hosts as bodies give out. Young hosts are preferred because the body lasts longer. That detail is where the story gets genuinely uncomfortable, and not in the fun horror way. It brushes against real-world trafficking, which Meaghan flagged and which made us both squirm.
What Works: Gore, Sound, and a House With Teeth
The wins in this film are real, and we want to be clear about that before we get into what didn’t land.
The character design for Katie is one of the most memorable things we have seen on screen this year. The “wrappings” are her skin, functioning as a spell to keep the demon inside. Every time she showed up on camera, we got the ick in the best possible way.
Natalie Calloway (a 22-year-old playing a young girl, by the way) does not hold back. The end sequence, with her walking half-bent and tweaked out, is lodged in our heads.
The kids’ performances across the board are great. Lee Cronin clearly has a gift for getting actual work out of kid actors, not the “looking shocked” kind of performance that usually shows up in horror films.
Sebastian, the brother who grew up without his sister and now has to deal with a fake version of her, carries real emotional weight. Maude, the little sister with the unibrow, is heartbreaking and sweet. (We love her. Protect her at all costs.)
The sound design is the other standout. Katie’s teeth-tapping tic, the little creaks when someone shifts in a chair during a tense scene, the atmospheric layering during kills, it all adds gravity. In a theater, the sounds move around you, and it genuinely makes the bad moments worse (in the best way).
The setting deserves credit, too. The family’s Albuquerque house is secluded, creaky, old, and slightly colonial, and it feels like its own character. The crawl spaces in the walls are fully unhinged from a floor-plan perspective.
Arthur is still mad about the wasted square footage:
You can walk through the whole house behind the walls.
Visually, though, they pay off. The scene where Katie skitters across the ceiling during the wake is one of the best shots in the movie. And the practical effects are everywhere.
Lee Cronin came from the Evil Dead Rise cheese grater school of horror, and that commitment to doing things for real carries through. Special mention to the prosthetic work: May Calamawy attended a special screening wearing the neck wound prosthetic, and the video hit 20 million views in a day because people thought she was actually injured. That is how good it looks.
Where It Stumbles: Tonal Confusion and Wheelchair Gymnastics
This is the part where we have to be honest. The movie has problems, and they are the kind of problems that pull you out of it in real time.
The biggest one: tonal whiplash. One minute we are watching someone get brutally murdered, the next there is a silly little jingle playing. Some of these tracks back to Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead DNA, where campy moments coexist with brutality because the franchise is campy at its base. The Mummy does not have that base. It has not earned the right to be goofy, so when it is, it reads as unwanted camp rather than intentional flavor.
Case in point: the wheelchair scene. Katie is being dragged up the stairs in a wheelchair for what feels like a full minute and a half.
Two people. One in front, one in back. Or one on either side. She’s a 10 year old child, come on.
That whole sequence is supposed to be serious, but it plays as unintentional comedy.
Case in point, part two: the wake scene. Maude pulls out her own teeth (fucked up, fine), then walks over to the open casket and takes her grandma’s dentures and puts them in her own mouth. We think it’s supposed to be unsettling. It plays as funny. People on Reddit apparently had the same reaction, which is telling.
The split diopter shot gets used way too often. A few times, sure, cool flex. By the sixth and seventh use, we were noticing it rather than being immersed. Same story with the Egypt stuff; for a movie called The Mummy, the actual Egyptian elements feel shoehorned in.
We were not asking for an action-epic Brendan Fraser reboot (that’s coming, by the way, with Rachel Weisz, and we are losing our minds about it).
We were asking for a film that felt steeped in its own mythology. Instead, the setting jumps from Cairo to New Mexico and mostly stays in New Mexico, and any Egyptologist-style context is missing. We wanted someone to explain the history of the demon. We didn’t get it.
The Cast Pulls Most of the Weight
Regardless of the tonal mess, the performances are solid across the board. Jack Reynor is great as Charlie, playing a father who is half in denial and half falling apart (for too long, honestly; forty minutes of “maybe she’s fine” is pushing it). Laia Costa as Larissa is incredible, especially in the moments where you can see her wanting so badly for Katie to actually be Katie.
Meaghan brought up a real-world parallel here that’s worth sharing: the Frederic Bourdin case. In 1997, a 23-year-old French man convinced a San Antonio family that he was their 13-year-old son who had gone missing in 1994. He had brown eyes instead of blue and a French accent. They still let him live with them for months. People will believe things that comfort them. That parallel makes Larissa’s denial land harder than the script gives it credit for.
Abuela (Verónica Falcón) is a bright spot we wanted more time with, and then the movie brutally does her dirty. The magician (Hayat Kamille) is genuinely scary and does exactly what the character needs to do.
Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy, in her first horror role since Djinn in 2013) is a bad bitch, and we wanted more of her; she is running her own investigation on the Egypt side of things, and we barely get to see her work. Emily Mitchell as young Katie sells the opening prologue in a way that makes the loss hit.
Final Verdict
We both landed around a five. Maybe five point five on a generous day. The movie has real highs (design, sound, gore, performances) and real lows (tonal confusion, overused camera tricks, plot elements that feel bolted on). It is worth watching if you are a horror fan. It is also not going to be the film Lee Cronin clearly wanted it to be, at least not for us.
As Meaghan said, this is
An Evil Dead movie with a mummy filter on top.
We cannot unhear that. We will not try.
One last thing. If you are going to see this in a theater, put your phone away. We had a middle-aged man texting through half the screening in front of us, and it is genuinely wild that this crosses every generation now.
Meaghan’s take: “If you cannot leave your phone alone for two hours, I think you need to have a conversation about the capacity that you have for attention span.” Be good people. Stay scared.