Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

by Hope Madden

So, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. You may be wondering, who is Lee Cronin? Do I even know that guy?

You probably do, if you saw 2023’sEvil Dead Rise, the story of a family trapped in their apartment as their mother turns Deadite and tries to murder them all.

You may have missed his 2019 Irish horror, The Hole in the Ground, where a changeling takes the shape of a woman’s young son, traps her in a house and tries to kill her.

Now Cronin takes on a mummy’s curse, trapping a family inside a house with their daughter, who is now a monster out to kill every one of them. By the third time, you have to think that the idea of an evil entity taking over the body of a loved one is a real fixation for the filmmaker. Lucky for us!

Jack Raynor and Laia Costa are the parents of three: little Maud (Billie Roy), tween Sebastian (Shylo Molina), and their oldest, Katie (Emily Mitchell, then Natalie Grace). Katie went missing in Cairo 8 years ago, but she’s been found and she’s ready to come home. It’ll just take some adjusting.

The trailer for the film gave it the look of a PG13 horror—quick cuts, jump scares, and black vomit. I’m pleased to report that this is not the film at all. Cronin mines the situation for grief and sorrow before descending into body horror. It’s a wild line he crosses, manipulating your emotions and then throwing gross-out body fluid horror all over the deviled eggs.

It’s nasty. Like almost early Peter Jackson nasty.

And Cronin is not afraid to take the film places you may not want to go. The darkest, sloppiest comedy butts up against emotional horror so moving you may want to look away. Or if that doesn’t make you divert your eyes, the pus, eyeballs, tongues, and unspecified body fluids will.

It’s a mixed bag, this one, and it gets a little tedious toward the end. Plus, Cronin doesn’t always balance the tone effectively. This is very much an R-rated horror, at times taking itself too seriously and at others, delivering some of the nastiest comic gags you’ve ever seen during a funeral.

I was unsettled at times and grossed out at others, but I must say, I was thoroughly entertained.