Official Trailer
Rating: 6.7/10 | Genre: Horror, Mystery | Runtime: 133 min
Starring: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Shylo Molina
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a weird movie that doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. It’s got horror elements, mystery elements, and a premise that should be genuinely unsettling, but somewhere along the way it gets tangled up in its own story. That said, there’s enough here to make it worth watching if you’ve got two hours and change to kill.
The setup is solid. A journalist’s daughter vanishes into the desert. Eight years pass. Then she shows up again, seemingly unaged, and her family gets her back. Sounds great, right? Wrong. Something is deeply off with her. And I mean deeply. The movie spends its runtime slowly peeling back what actually happened to this girl and what she’s become.
Where It Works
Jack Reynor carries most of this film as the father dealing with the horror of what his daughter has become. He’s in basically every scene and he commits to the emotional weight of it all. There’s a moment early on where he realizes something is wrong with her, and his face just breaks. It’s the best acting in the movie.
Laia Costa plays the mother, and she has less to do but she makes it count. The family dynamics in those early scenes feel real and raw. You believe these are people who’ve been shattered by loss and are desperate to believe their daughter came back to them.
The horror elements actually land when the movie lets them breathe. There are a few scenes in the second half that genuinely made me uncomfortable. Without spoiling anything, there’s a sequence involving what happened to the daughter in the desert that’s properly disturbing. Cronin doesn’t shy away from showing you the bad stuff, and that commitment to keeping things grotesque is appreciated.
Where It Falls Apart
The pacing is all over the place. At 133 minutes, this movie feels bloated. There are long stretches where nothing happens except people talking about what might have happened. The mystery unfolds slowly, which could work, but the script doesn’t give you enough to chew on while you’re waiting. You’re just sitting there watching characters react to things we’re not fully understanding yet.
May Calamawy and Natalie Grace play younger versions of family members in flashback sequences, and those scenes are the weakest part of the movie. The flashbacks interrupt the main timeline constantly and they don’t reveal information in an interesting way. You kind of just watch these scenes and think, okay, so this happened, moving on.
The ending is where things really get messy. The movie tries to go bigger than it has the budget or script for. It’s like Cronin suddenly remembered he was making a mummy movie and crammed mythology and supernatural stuff into the final act that doesn’t mesh with the grounded horror of what came before. I won’t spoil it, but the tonal shift is jarring.
The Verdict
The Mummy is a movie with genuine ideas that doesn’t pull them off perfectly. It’s got strong performances and some truly unsettling moments, but it’s hampered by slow pacing and a third act that reaches for something bigger than the story can actually support. It sits at 6.7 on TMDB for a reason. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either.
Watch it if you like slow-burn horror and don’t mind sitting through some meandering plot. Just know going in that you’re not getting a clean payoff. You’re getting an interesting premise that sort of dissolves into weirdness by the end.
Have you seen this one? What did you think of how it handled the mystery? Let me know in the comments.
Where to Watch
Rent on: Amazon Video
Buy on: CosmoGo
