Evil Dead Mummy, Egyptian Evil Dead, Evil Dead Wrapping, Bring Her Back from the Evil Dead, The Exorcist of the Evil Dead, Resident Evil Dead… a dear child has many names, as we say in Scandinavia. But what this is certainly not, is a new entry from the Universal Monsters Universe. To avoid more confusion and potential legal copyright issues, Blumhouse/Atomic Monster took the easy fix by adding the director’s name above the title — while the grimy, necro promo posters alone spoke loud and clear by itself that this is a whole new take on the mummy concept. And if you still expected something in the same style of the more lighthearted and adventurous approach of The Mummy from 1999 and only waited for Brendan Fraser to show up, well, then you have no one but yourself to blame (LOL). Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is pure mean-spirited horror, through and through, and to quote Emil from RoboCop: I LIKE IT!!
We’re in Cairo, Egypt, where the little girl Katie gets kidnapped by a creepy horse-faced-looking lady. She’s the type of person who looks like a walking spell, and has groomed Katie with candy for some time. Dad Charlie, who’s a TV reporter, runs after her through some narrow streets until he gets slowed down by a sudden sandstorm and loses them. The local police won’t do shit as the scummy lead detective only suspects the parents. What can you say…
Eight years go by where the family, Charlie, his wife Larissa and their two children, Sebastian and Maud, have since moved to dusty Albuquerque, New Mexico. Then the phone rings. Their daughter has been found – alive. Well, sort of. The bad news is that she was found in a sarcophagus, of all things, from a crashed cargo plane in the desert of Aswan — and is now in a locked-in catatonic state in a wheelchair looking like a ghoulish, rotting corpse that has just been dug up from the grave by Wednesday 13. Time has not been kind to her, to put it mildly. Besides all that, her heart is in great condition. Hm..
A top comment I’ve seen floating around is the lack of logic of bringing her back home in the condition that she’s in, rather than just discard her like trash and let her rot at the hospital. Well, if we’re gonna have some serious talk here about logic, and a quick psychology course for dummies while we’re at it, it could maybe have something to do with the sweet health insurance? Since this is the United States of ‘Merica, BOY, where the power of thoughts and pears are way more lifesaving than one’s basic rights to proper healthcare will ever be. Or maybe the parents aren’t, you know, just some cold psychopaths. I’m not a parent, so what do I know.
The big question is, of course, what the hell really happened to her, and why. Hell happened, that’s for sure. And Hell will happen again as soon as she gets rolled back home with her parents and two siblings. Katie starts to act more weird, uncanny and unpredictable with sudden violent tics, one that ends up headbutting poor grandma to a nosebleed. At night, she runs on all fours like a wild dog in the crawlspace to hunt for scorpions to eat before puking green goo. While this sounds more like a generic possession movie, you’ll be surprised…and disgusted… and maybe lose your appetite for the rest of the week.
Not to slip into spoiler territory, but yes, we have a possession thing going on here that was on full display in the trailers. But on the surface, this is actually a mummy movie — with even a mummy. Yeah, I know, I’m as surprised as you. There’s a lot to chew on here (and swallow, for that matter), just from the aggressive visuals alone, where Lee Cronin seems to be a big fan of the so-called split diopter-effect, shot by cinematographer David Garbett, who also did Evil Dead Rise (2023) with Cronin. It’s icky, which puts an extra flavor to it. The dusty and old, almost Resident Evil’ish haunted house-setting that is the home of the family in New Mexico works perfect for the backdrop. The heavy atmosphere is consistent with much of the same edge as the first two Conjuring films, mixed with the gritty detective aspects like Deliver Us from Evil (2014), without the rain, of course.
All the actors do a solid job, but Natalia Grace, who plays the mummy girl, doesn’t get enough roses. She has the perfect balance of looking like a vulnerable vegetable while at the same time reeking with the same intimidating force like Pazuzu, or maybe Mumzuzu in this case. The film is way more brutal and bleak than expected, especially having in mind that this is Blumhouse, where I assumed that only The Grabber had full access to the Splatter & Gore department. All, if not most effects are practical, and they all rip, in all literal sense.
Then there’s the already infamous gross-out scenes which goes all up to eleven during a wake/funeral scene that starts off with an old wine-sipping lady saying the embalming fluid is the new Botox. Haha. It’s something straight out from the dinner scene from Braindead where the pitch-dark gallows humor shouldn’t work, but it somehow does. Some moments here are truly disgusting, even for a ghoul like me — and after witnessing the young girl grinning with the uncanny teeth in full context, is now a still image that will lives rent-free in my head for a while. This could easily have been a muddled, tonal mess, especially judging by the trailers, but Lee Cronin manages to stitch it all together into a cohesive and highly entertaining dark wild ride where the runtime of two hours and fifteen minutes flew away like a crispy leaf on a windy autumn day. One of the best horror films of 2026.
Writer & director: Lee Cronin
Country & year: USA/Ireland/Spain, 2026
Actors: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Shylo Molina, Billie Roy, Veronica Falcón, Hayat Kamille, May Elghety, Emily Mitchell, Husam Chadat, Tim Seyfi, Mark Mitchinson
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32612507/
