Instinctually, as a film critic, I am wary of films that put the director’s name before a film’s title. However, in the case of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (yes, that’s the full title), that distinction is indeed earned.

Cronin may not be an immediately recallable name when it comes to directors — he directed the okay-ish Evil Dead Rise — but that perception changes fast.

Touted as a reboot of The Mummy franchise — though neither a reboot nor a continuation of the adventuresque series of movies starring Brendan Fraser (this is a Warner Bros release, Fraser’s came from Universal) — Lee Cronin’s film is defiantly steeped in a “director’s vision.”

I wouldn’t take these air quotes lightly, for the film, despite being somewhat janky in its opening, is brutal, gory and gruesome. It had scenes that even made me flinch, shudder and instinctively rub my arms and legs time and again. And believe me, that last part is not easy to achieve. The film is less about the mummified undead and more about demonic possession. Surprisingly, the mummy angle fits quite well into the story Cronin is telling.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is brutal, gory and downright gruesome but also near-brilliant in its director’s vision of the old franchise

Some of the build-up doesn’t make quite as much sense at first. In Aswan, Egypt, a happy family comes home to find their pet bird dead in a puddle of black ooze. The parents, panicked, enter a barricaded area of their house that has an ominous black pyramid in the middle.

The next few minutes bring about a lot of questions that get no answers: what is a pyramid doing in their house? Why are the parents hoisting the lid off a giant, unadorned coffin? And why are they concerned that the mummified remains of the man inside are still sleeping?

The plot abruptly shifts to Charlie Connor (Jack Reynor), an investigative reporter from America stationed in Cairo. Like the family before them, Charlie lives a happy life with his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), a nurse, and his two kids, Katie and Sebastian (Emily Mitchell, Dean Allen Williams), but secretly waits for a better job offer to shift the family to New York.

Their plans go to Hades in the worst way possible. Katie gets kidnapped by a woman called ‘Magician’ (Hayat Kamille), and when Charlie gives chase, the alleyways of the city are hit with a supernatural sandstorm that howls like the undead (the sound effects are, at times, annoyingly generic and in the forefront).

Charlie and Larissa go to the local police, where they meet a sceptical captain and his subordinate, Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), a sharp cop with a dog-with-a-bone attitude.

Eight years later, Katie hasn’t been found, and Charlie has shifted his family to Larissa’s mother’s house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, working at a local television network. Their new daughter, Maud (Billie Roy), is bright and happy, and the family, though still haunted by Katie’s disappearance, lives a semblance of a normal life… until a plane carrying the ominous coffin falls out of the air near Cairo, and doctors find Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) inside it: alive, in pain, but wrapped like a mummy.

Dalia, now in charge, remembers Charlie and Larissa’s case, and the parents return to Cairo to bring Katie back home. Their child is literally a shell of a human — unrecognisable, emaciated, with mangled arms, incapable of speech, and sporting overgrown, cracked, rotting fingernails. Inside her, as one may guess, lives the Nasmaranian, a demonic entity that dates to stories before the time of Christ.

Things go bad for the family fast and Cronin’s film happily goes to extremes, especially when the story enters its third act. At times, it feels that the director is pushing the film simply because he feels like he has the liberty to do so (Cronin is also the writer). One thing it never gets is boring.

By the end, as Cronin wraps up the story with neat, unexpected finesse, one feels like this story should not continue in a sequel. Although there is room, any continuation might sully the near-brilliant, standalone nature of this film. Thoroughly recommended, though not for the squeamish.

Released by HKC and Warner Bros, and produced by Jason Blum (Paranormal Activity, The Black Phone) and James Wan (Insidious, The Conjuring), Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is rated ‘A’ (for Adults) in Pakistan — however, even for a few adults in the cinema, it became too much (three left when the gruesomeness became overwhelming)

The writer is Icon’s primary film reviewer

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 3rd, 2026