Lee Cronin’s The Mummy: Not Starring Brendan Fraser, Severely More Cursed

(SeaPRwire) –   Warning: This post contains spoilers for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, now in theaters.

“BRENDAN FRASER IS NOT IN LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY”

In the final two weeks before the April 17 premiere of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Blumhouse’s official X account posted this statement daily for almost a week. This all-caps campaign aimed to definitively end any lingering rumors that the star of Stephen Sommers’ adored 1999 version of The Mummy would appear in Cronin’s upcoming horror film.

While the barrage of tweets might have appeared excessive, the director’s new take on the property leans much more into a delightfully cruel body-horror movie than a family-friendly favorite. Considering that, it was likely a crucial point to emphasize. Cronin’s Mummy, following his work on 2023’s Evil Dead Rise (the most financially successful film in that series), steers the Universal franchise down a totally new path. This updated narrative has no connection to a cursed Egyptian priest returning from the grave. Instead, it ventures into the darker, more disturbing territories of child kidnapping, torture, and demonic possession.

What happens in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy?

The film begins with the abduction of 8-year-old Katie Cannon (played as a child by Emily Mitchell and as a teen by Natalie Grace) from her family’s Cairo apartment garden. Her parents, Charlie (Jack Reynor) and the pregnant Larissa (Laia Costa), along with her older brother Sebastián (Dean Allen Williams as a child, Shylo Molina as a teen), are helpless as police searches fail. Eight years later, the grieving Cannon family has moved back to America, living in Albuquerque with Larissa’s mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcón). They are now also raising Maud (Billie Roy), the child Larissa was expecting when Katie vanished. When Charlie gets a call that Katie has been discovered, unearthed from a millennia-old sarcophagus, he and Larissa race to Egypt. They are met not by their little girl, but by a mummy-like, nearly unresponsive shell of her.

“There’s a chance to play around with lore in a different way,” Cronin explained to IndieWire about reworking the classic monster. “Also a mummy being somewhat of a blank canvas that you can then put horrific traits into because it’s not Dracula. It’s its own thing. It is kind of like a blank space.”

The reason for Katie’s demonic behavior

Once back in Albuquerque, Katie’s emerging tendency for sudden violence escalates into full-blown, demonic acts. This becomes understandable when Detective Dalia (May Calamawy), still investigating the case from Cairo, finally uncovers the truth: Katie was taken by a figure known only as the Magician (Hayat Kamille), who performed a ritual to transform the girl into a host for an ancient evil called the Nasmaranian. However, this knowledge does little to soften the horror of Katie’s gruesome acts of self-mutilation, particularly after she mesmerizes her siblings into joining her.

As Lee Cronin’s The Mummy progresses, it adopts a progressively nastier tone. It builds to a brutal, Evil Dead-inspired climax centered on a sentimental sacrifice that feels somewhat out of place after such a ruthless film. Conversely, without giving away the conclusion, this turn of events lets the movie finish with a more gratifying sense of karmic retribution, where the horror is transferred to another rather than resolved. Now that is a curse you cannot escape.