2026 Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

• Director: Lee Cronin
• Writers: Lee Cronin
• Stars: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, and Verónica Falcón
• Runtime: 133 minutes
• Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJ0uv-phsDk

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

A girl disappears in Egypt. Eight years later, she turns up and is returned to her family. But she’s not at all right, and it’s a nightmare for everyone that just gets worse and worse as the movie progresses. The effects are nasty and effective. The story and pacing are good, and it never lets up. We both thought it was great.

Spoilery Synopsis

An Egyptian family is on vacation, and Mom is grumpy. The pet bird has somehow fallen over into a puddle of blood. The adults know what’s going on and head to the pyramid they have buried in the basement. “How do we know it’s time?” asks the husband. “We check,” says the wife. They open the huge stone sarcophagus using a complicated winch setup and peek inside. “Is he awake?” Yeah, he’s awake. Credits roll.

Charlie Cannon is in Cairo teaching his kids Morse Code. He’s a reporter in Egypt. His wife, Larissa, is pregnant with another kid, but the first two like to fight a lot. The little girl, Katie, meets Layla’s mother, the magician, and she looks very familiar. She’s got candy and magic tricks, and she gives Katie candy and an apple. She also feeds her a magic bug. When Charlie goes to look for her, she’s vanished.

Detective Zaki is newly assigned to Missing Persons at the police department, and she’s assigned Katie’s case. The chief detective thinks Charlie killed his own daughter.

Eight years later, Charlie and his family live in New Mexico, and they have never found Katie. Older Sebastian wants to go on a school trip to Europe, but his mother won’t allow it. Maud has been born and is about eight.

Back in Egypt, an airplane falls from the sky. Inside the plane was that stone sarcophagus we saw before. Experts try to image what’s inside but can’t see through it. They open it up, and there’s a mummy inside. The mummy inside is in surprisingly good shape and then sits up, screaming. It’s Katie.

Charlie gets a call from Cairo, and the man there says they found Katie– alive. She’s catatonic and has weird skin, heavily sedated, but she’s not quite right. Zaki explains about the way Katie was recovered.

As monstrous as Katie is now, the parents take her home. She quickly goes full-Exorcist in front of the whole family. Seb and Maud are a little terrified of her, and the parents are at a loss as well. Katie sneaks into the big crawl space in the walls that night and leads them all on a chase.

The next day, Larissa and her mother try to clean up Katie, and her toenails and teeth are horrific. This goes… badly. Charlie suggests finding a place for Katie to live, but Larissa’s not having that; this leads to an argument. Katie pulls off a big strip of skin from her leg, and Charlie notices that it has Egyptian writing on the inside.

Charlie shows the strips of skin to Professor Baxter, an expert. The text is extremely old, and the professor gets to work on translating it. Katie doesn’t speak, but she makes clicking noises that Charlie recognizes as Morse Code. She says, “Layla” over and over. Charlie soon figures out that Layla was the neighbor girl back in Egypt.

Late that night, Katie uses her supernatural powers to possess Maud. Baxter tells Charlie that Nazmeranian is an ancient Egyptian demon, a destroyer of families who travels from person to person. Then it was trapped by using an ancient ritual.

Zaki works on tracking down Layla at a nectarine farm in the middle of the desert. She finds the house with the pyramid inside and goes exploring. She shoots Layla’s mother and then chases Layla through the farm. She eventually finds a videotape about Katie, and it talks about how using an innocent child is best. “Katie is not supposed to be outside the box.” Layla has no tongue, so she writes out a full explanation.

Meanwhile, Katie and a pack of coyotes mess up Grandma. At the funeral, Maud is looking pretty evil as Katie’s bedroom door now has a big padlock on it. Still, Katie starts her corrupting work on Seb next. The funeral is memorable, to say the least.

Zaki shows up and shows Charlie and Lari the tape. Eighty-two people have been mummified to contain the evil Nazmaranian – children work the best because they hold up the longest. We see what they did to little Katie; Nazmeranian came out of the old, dead mummy and into her. Then they wrapped her like a mummy and buried her.

At the same time, Seb is upstairs helping Katie peel her skin off. Dead-Grandma gets up out of her coffin and torments Charlie. Katie goes berserk and attacks… everyone. All manner of nastiness ensues. Eventually, Zaki says the magic words that make Nazmaranian leave Katie’s body and go into Charlie’s.

Katie wakes up, mentally normal now. They bury Charlie in a chained-up box in the basement with the proper runes to keep him inside. He taps out in Morse Code to the three kids. Katie’s normal again, as are Seb and Maud.

Zaki and Lari talk; Layla’s mother isn’t dead, but in prison. Lari comes into her cell and brings Charlie with her… to transfer Nazmeranian into the evil woman…

Brian’s Commentary

The scariest part might be the toenail-clipping scene. There’s a lot of body horror and gore here, and it’s all really well done. All the creature effects here are really excellent.

The family needed to institutionalize Katie after about the first hour, but even after her weirdness became evident to everyone, they still didn’t do anything.

The acting, sets, and everything are really good here, especially the pacing, which never slows down or gets boring for a minute.

This was excellent!

Kevin’s Commentary

It’s got some real cringe and wince moments with the gore and effects with body horror.

That was the best wake ever.

Everything about it was really well put together, very impressive. I liked it a lot. Best of the modern Mummy movies for sure.