When Dublin director Lee Cronin (Evil Dead Rise, The Hole in the Ground) announced that he was bringing horror icon The Mummy back from the dead, he promised it would be “unlike any Mummy movie you ever laid eyeballs on before”.
“I’m digging deep into the earth to raise something very ancient and very frightening,” he added as he grabbed the shovel, bound for Ardmore Studios in Co Wicklow and AlmerÃa in Spain.
Watch: The teaser for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
True to his word, Cronin has delivered a wild night inside and outside the box, with a screenplay that taps into every parent’s nightmare. Few movies arrive in cinemas with an 18s cert these days, but Cronin’s wears that rating as a badge of honour. And anyone bemoaning that most multiplex fright nights just aren’t bonkers enough should get their fill of pedicures, bodily fluids, and scorpions here. They may never look at a buffet in the same way again.
The story begins in Cairo with the abduction of Katie (Emily Mitchell), the eldest child of TV reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) and his nurse wife Larissa (Laila Costa). It’s a well-worked prologue that shows Cronin can do more than gore.
Eight years later, the Cannon family are back in the US when the phone rings: Katie has been found in Egypt. Alive.
(L-R) Actress Hayat Kamille and writer-director Lee Cronin on the set of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which was filmed at Ardmore Studios in Co Wicklow and AlmerÃa in Spain
Arriving at a Cairo hospital, Mam and Dad are warned that the reunion they’ve dreamed of is not the one they’re about to get. Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) is in a locked-in state. Despite the doctor’s grave intonation, nothing can prepare the couple for who they see when the curtain around Katie’s bed is pulled back.
It’s also the perfect scene for you to stop eating the popcorn…
(L-R) Shylo Molina as Sebastián Cannon and Billie Roy as Maud Cannon prepare for the worst
When the Cannons return with Katie to their home in New Mexico, Cronin uses everything he’s learned in his career to date to put the viewer through the wringer. This is a skin-crawling (and peeling!) descent into bolt-the-bedroom-door chaos that channels the same malignant energies as, say, The Exorcist, The Omen, and last year’s Bring Her Back. Kudos by the bucketload go to the makeup and effects teams and newcomer Grace as Katie for their work in a house that’s never seen a can of WD-40.
The Mummy’s script could’ve done with a few blasts of the magic spray, mind. It is about 15-20 minutes overlong; a wake scene jumps the, well, corpse, the big reveal of the “What happened to Katie?” tagline is just too distressing, and Cronin should have wrapped (yes, yes) on the penultimate scene.
But in a genre where every new offering sells itself as the ‘most terrifying film of the year’, Cronin looks like he’s made the 2026 bragging rights his own.