The Mummy (2026)

Score: 3 / 5

Lee Cronin's big-budget bloodbath has more in common with the Evil Dead franchise than anything related to Universal's property, but that doesn't make it any less entertaining and disgusting.

In developing his original take on curses involving mummified bodies, Cronin crafts a strange story that removes any sentimental ideas about a pharaoh-mummy looking for his ancient lost love (like in the 1932 original or any of its sequels and remakes) or even one seeking global domination. Instead Cronin gives us a family grieving its daughter, abducted in Cairo with no trace. Moving on in Albuquerque, they're shocked to receive a call eight years later that Katie, their eldest, has been inexplicably found, having been tortured and malnourished to the point of catatonia, despite being in otherwise reasonable health. She's brought home and brings an unspeakable horror with her, threatening to tear the family apart, and I do mean bodily.

Our filmmaker pulls from what he learned in his previous directorial feature, Evil Dead Rise, in how to be as gross and wet as possible on screen. Actually, once Katie is home and the real horrors commence, the story could just as well be about the chaotic Deadites; people are violated, mutilated, and possessed in rapid, often random sequence. Cronin does seem to have some trouble pacing the film in a consistent manner, and I think that has to do with these competing impulses of what defines a mummy movie and what makes torture porn. He has to often pause the onslaught of violence to explain a fairly complex plot involving a demon that consumes family units; any previous Mummy movie is almost exclusively about its plot, whereas no Evil Dead movie is about its plot (at least, none of the ones worth watching). But when we get back to the violence, it can be pretty hard to stomach.

Part of the problem with these gross-out horror films with big budgets -- I'm also thinking of Evil Dead Burn, this summer -- is that there's only so much they can do that hasn't been done before. While there's always room for simple stylistic differences, some of these franchises push things perhaps too far. I had trouble, during the climax of this film, stomaching some of the abject cruelty it was projecting from the screen. I can handle a lot, but watching extended sequences of a child being terrorized and tortured was simply unpleasant, made much worse intercut with her parents' helpless reaction to seeing it all graphically recorded on VHS. After an entire -- and too lengthy, really -- film that made us wonder about how Katie had been tormented into the monster we see, they finally decide to show us in gratuitous manner without justifying the need for us to see it. Hearing it is almost unbearable enough.

Cronin's skills at crafting nasty scares don't entirely make up for this screenplay, which also features a few too many holes for my liking. Much like the Deadites, there don't seem to be any rules as to what the demon inside Katie can do, so she can conveniently perform telekinesis or telepathy at certain moments. The characters simply do not behave rationally around this consistently violent and profane presence in their house, like the grandmother who repeatedly prays over Katie and gets attacked each time. And don't get me started on the plane crash scene that inexplicably reveals Katie to the authorities.

But then, who comes to a movie like this (meaning like torture porn, not a cute '90s adventure-comedy-romance about ancient curses and librarians) for the plot? It's all about the big set pieces covered in gore, and Cronin does that effectively. A notable scene that felt ripped from Sam Raimi himself features lots of bodily fluids being splashed all over plates of food and wine at a funeral service, and it's a moment like that when you can see why an auteur decides to pursue certain material. He's helped in pursuing his vision by a dedicated cast, including wide-eyed Jack Reynor and a fierce Laia Costa, whose scenes together (usually terrified, always weeping) must have been simply exhausting to shoot.