I walked into Lee Cronin’s The Mummy hoping for something stupid in the best way. You know the feeling. You want the director of Evil Dead Rise to take a chainsaw to a tired franchise and see what kind of noise it makes. And for maybe twenty minutes, I thought I was going to get it.
That prologue in Cairo? Fine. Whatever. But then we cut to Jack Reynor on the phone while his daughter Katie wanders off to play with a “secret friend” named Layla, and I remember thinking: Oh no, we’re doing the slow walk toward tragedy, aren’t we. And we were. We really were.
Here’s the thing about Cronin’s movie that nobody warned me about. It’s not scary. It’s not even particularly fun, outside of one deranged sequence involving deviled eggs and someone’s vomit that I genuinely cannot stop picturing. What it is, instead, is relentless in a way that stops meaning anything after about an hour. You know how when someone yells at you for too long, you just stop hearing the words? That’s this movie. It keeps hitting you with the same hammer, over and over, and eventually you just want the hammer to go bother someone else.
Recommended: Faces of Death (2026) Parents Guide
The girl, Katie. She gets possessed. Or taken over. Or replaced. Honestly, the film explains it so many times that I stopped caring what the official answer was. She comes home after eight years missing, locked inside her own body, and something ancient is using her like a puppet whose strings are made of viscera. Her skin comes off in sheets. Her teeth chatter. At one point, someone just starts yanking their own teeth out of their head, and the movie presents this like it’s a jump scare when really it just made me sad for the actor’s dentist.
But here’s my real problem. The one I kept turning over on the drive home.
I don’t think Cronin likes these people.
Not in a mean way. In a they’re just furniture way. The father, played by Reynor, drifts through the whole movie like he’s waiting for his real scene to start. The mother has moments, Laia Costa is too good to disappear entirely, but she’s given nothing to work with except screaming and staring. And the kids are just… there. Objects for the evil to act upon. When Katie starts tearing her family apart from the inside, I should feel something more complicated than well, that’s gross. I should feel the love turning to terror. The guilt. The primal wrongness of fearing your own child.
I didn’t feel any of that. Because Cronin wasn’t interested in that movie. He was interested in the one where a girl’s jaw unhinges and somebody eats something they shouldn’t.
Look, I’m not saying that movie can’t work. Give me another Evil Dead and I’ll show up with popcorn and a weak stomach. But don’t dress it up as a family tragedy and then forget to write the tragedy part. Don’t cast actors who could break your heart and then have them stand around while a detective explains the mythology for the fourth time.
There’s a moment. One moment. Katie’s grandmother is at the wake, yes, there’s a wake, it goes about as well as you’d expect ,and she’s holding a deviled egg. And then the blood spume hits. And for ninety seconds, the movie becomes what it wanted to be all along: a sick joke told by someone who genuinely loves the punchline.
Then it goes back to explaining itself. And I went back to checking my watch.
I don’t hate Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. That would require more energy than it deserves. I’m just disappointed. Because somewhere in that 134 minutes is a great, horrible, funny little movie trying to claw its way out. But every time it gets close, Cronin shoves it back down and hands you another rulebook.
You’ll squirm. You might even laugh once or twice. But you won’t feel a thing. And for a movie this bloody, that’s the real failure.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Parents Guide
Let me be direct with you. This movie is rated R for “strong disturbing violent content, gore, language and brief drug use,” and the MPAA isn’t exaggerating for once. If your kid is under seventeen, you’ve got some thinking to do. Not because the movie is good it’s not, really but because it’s mean in a way that sticks to you.
Violence & Intensity: This is the main event. The whole reason the rating exists. You get skin peeled off in flaps. Teeth ripped out by the roots. A child’s body decomposing while she’s still walking around. Blood in the deviled eggs. Vomit in a wine glass. Someone’s jaw unhinges. Limbs get chewed on. And none of it is played for quick shocks, Cronin lingers. He wants you to look. The intensity never lets up, which sounds like a compliment but isn’t. By the halfway point, you’re not scared anymore. You’re just tired. For a sensitive kid, though? They won’t make it that far. They’ll tap out during the teeth scene. You know the one.
Language: Swearing, yes. Nothing that’ll shock anyone who’s been in a high school hallway. A few shits, a couple fucks, the usual assortment of angry words people say when a possessed child is trying to kill them. No slurs that I caught. The tone is more exhausted than venomous. Honestly, the language is the least of your worries here.
Sexual Content / Nudity: The movie is too busy being wet and crunchy to care about sex. You get a married couple who share a bed and kiss sometimes. That’s it. No nudity, no suggestive scenes, no weird horror-as-sexual-metaphor stuff. Cronin keeps his mind on the viscera.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: “Brief drug use” is doing some heavy lifting in that MPA description. What you actually get: someone smokes a cigarette. Someone else drinks at a wake. There’s a mention of pills at one point but you don’t see them swallowed. That’s it. The movie is too busy with the blood spume to worry about recreational chemistry. If you’re scanning for weed or needles or anything a kid might imitate, you can exhale.
Age Recommendation
Here’s where I stop being a critic and start being a parent who watched this alone in a dark theater and thought I’m glad my niece isn’t here.
Fifteen and up, maybe, if the kid has seen horror before and knows it’s not real. But you need to have a conversation first. Not about the gore, kids can handle gore. About the relentlessness. About how this movie doesn’t give you room to breathe, and how some viewers find that thrilling and others find it exhausting. About how the cruelty happens to a child, and the camera doesn’t look away.
Under fifteen? Hard no. Not because they’ll be traumatized. Because they’ll be bored by the long investigative stretches and then blindsided by the body horror, and that’s not a fun combination. Wait for something with a pulse.
