Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is now on VOD, and the movie leans hard into gross-out spectacle—using a cold open in Egypt, an eight-year jump, and a family’s desperate fight to get their daughter back. Critics are split on the logic and length, but few are missing th
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is now on VOD, and it arrives with an immediate promise: this is not going to be subtle.
The film starts in a dungeon-like cellar, flashing a small pyramid structure and a sarcophagus long enough to matter later. Then it barrels into what the movie seems determined to be—an aggressively nasty take on a classic monster-movie setup. Even the title’s apostrophe gets treated like part of the branding. not a typo: Cronin is not “the mummy” in a contraction sense. but in a possessive one.
From there, the story follows the Cannon family. They live in Cairo. Charlie (Jack Raynor) works as a TV news reporter. Larissa (Laia Costa) is a nurse. They have two kids—Seb (Dean Allen Williams) and Katie (Emily Mitchell)—and a third child is on the way.
One day, little Katie (Emily Mitchell) is lured away in the yard by a strange woman (Hayat Kamille). The bait is simple: candy. Katie is handed a tangerine, and a large beetle emerges from it and forces itself into Katie’s mouth. The woman snatches the girl and runs. Charlie chases her—until a sandstorm hits and Charlie loses track of her. Detective Dalia (May Calamawy) steps in, but she gets nowhere.
Then the movie slams time forward: EIGHT YEARS LATER.
The Cannons have resettled in America, moving to a big isolated desert home near Albuquerque, where Larissa grew up. Larissa lives with her mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcon). Seb is now played by Shylo Molina. Their new daughter is Maud (Billie Roy). Life keeps going—until it doesn’t.
Back in Egypt, a man fixes his bike as a plane crashes behind him. When he checks the wreckage. the most disturbing thing he finds is not a man impaled through the face on a tree limb with an eyeball on the ground. It’s the same sarcophagus from the opening. Officials retrieve it and crack it open to find teenage Katie (Natalie Grace) inside—alive, against-all-odds.
Now the family’s instinct is obvious. Larissa and Charlie want their daughter back and they love her unconditionally. But the state Katie is in makes that devotion complicated. Her mental state is described as not “all there.” Her skin is leathery. Her gaze is vacant in a terrifyingly malevolent way. and the film pushes past comfort with an insistently grotesque detail—“the toenail situation.”.
Doctors tell the family she only needs to be comfortable at home to rest and heal and that she’ll be just fine.
The trouble starts the moment Katie returns.
First thing Katie does is headbutt Grandma. Then she performs a crackity-bones body contortion that requires Larissa to hit the kid with an epi-pen tranquilizer—despite the fact that her parents insist they can take care of her just fine.
The house is drawn as a kind of trap with space behind the walls. designed so the family can hear thumping noises and go check. That’s exactly what happens: the family chases Katie through dimly lit. heavily cobwebbed corridors until she finds a large scorpion and swallows it whole. The film treats it as foreshadowing for a future scene.
The grossness isn’t accidental. The movie is described as indebted to The Exorcist and other demonic-possession films, with vestiges of Sam Raimi lingering from Cronin’s previous film, Evil Dead Rise.
Where the movie is built to push buttons is also where it draws comparisons to itself in the minds of viewers: it plays like a necro-aesthetic showpiece rather than a neatly wound plot. Even its runtime—134 minutes—is part of the complaint. The story leans on detours such as Detective Dalia snooping around. an old VHS tape. and a consultation with a professor of Egyptology. all adding to what the reviewer calls a tangle of “vaguely necessary plot curlicues.”.
Still, the movie’s craft is hard to miss in the moments where it’s at its most extreme. Cronin directs the “spewage” with close attention. using camerawork either as comedy—highlighted by a tumbling-down-the-steps POV cam—or as something closer to a lingering inspection of pus. bile. viscera. and the many combinations the film delivers.
The reviewer frames Cronin’s tone as a misshapen mix of grimness and “twinkle-in-the-eye sadistic humor.” It lands “slightly more than it doesn’t. ” with the entertainment value coming from the repulsion. There’s mention of what could be teased as themes—a marriage stressed by offspring being consumed from the inside out by a protege of Apep. and a “face-only-a-mother-could-love” concept taken to its breaking point—but the emphasis stays on the visceral spectacle. If you were expecting “another movie in which a man wrapped in Cottonelle staggers and moans a lot. ” the reviewer says this is not that.
The casting is described as fine rather than exemplary, and the biggest praise—or blame—lands on the practical-FX crew. The effects are characterized as so wildly creative they feel like an elementary-school cafeteria experiment run into horror.
The film keeps it focused elsewhere too: there’s no time for “Sex And Skin.”
And when it comes to the call—whether to watch or skip—the message is direct. You can criticize the flaws, or you can laugh at how hard it commits to making you recoil. Here, the recommendation is clear: STREAM IT.
Lee Cronin The Mummy VOD horror film demonic possession practical effects Evil Dead Rise Det. Dalia Cairo eight years later