Lee Cronin's The Mummy is the 2026 supernatural horror reimagining of the franchise, written and directed by Lee Cronin off the back of his deeply unpleasant — and that's a compliment — work on Evil Dead Rise. Produced by James Wan's Atomic Monster and Jason Blum's Blumhouse, with Jack Reynor leading a cast that includes Laia Costa, May Calamawy, and Natalie Grace, this is not the Mummy you grew up with. There is no Brendan Fraser. There is no Tom Cruise. There is, instead, an ancient Egyptian demon called the Nasmaranian and an exorcism-flavoured slow burn that pulls more from Poltergeist than from any prior entry in the series.

The premise is simple and effective. A journalist's young daughter disappears in the desert without a trace. Eight years later, she is returned to the family, mummified, and very much not herself. From there, the film commits hard to dread, practical effects, and a sustained sense of something fundamentally wrong settling into a household that should be relieved.

What I appreciated most going in was that I had managed to avoid all trailers and synopsis material. I'd strongly suggest doing the same if you can — the film rewards a blind viewing.

Cronin clearly approached this as an opportunity to push further than Evil Dead Rise, and the body horror in this film is genuinely intense. There are sequences that landed in a way I will not be able to scrub from my memory anytime soon. Specifically — and I won't elaborate — one scene plays directly into one of my long-standing phobias and elicited a reaction from me that I had no conscious control over. That is, in many ways, the best compliment a horror film can receive.

Where the film loses some ground is in its runtime. At two hours and fourteen minutes, there is fat on this story that could and should have been trimmed. A tighter ninety-minute edit would have produced a leaner, sharper, more relentless film. A few character decisions also strain credulity in ways that briefly broke immersion — though I acknowledge that's me being nitpicky in a film that otherwise commits to its tone with real confidence.

Lee Cronin has cemented himself as one of the most distinctive voices working in horror right now. I will watch whatever he makes next.