Lee Cronin’s The Mummy takes the audience to the edge of good taste

When director Danny Boyle made Trainspotting over 30 years ago, he had a clear policy – the film couldn’t be more than 90 minutes long, because that’s how much the audience could sustain in the face of gnarly, disturbing content.

Dublin man Lee Cronin has been entrusted with putting a new spin on The Mummy, and his vision demands a lot of his audience – 2 hours and 15 minutes.

2 hours and 15 minutes of a movie that looks like a Tool music video and has the sound design of an aggressive Aphex Twin song will push audiences to their limits.

Over 2 hours of sustained terror and nasty gore is going to ask a lot of an audience; to horror fans, this is nothing new, but to general audiences, it might be a bridge too far.

We’re not going to smack down a director for not playing to the lowest common denominator – especially not when a Dublin director is getting studio backing to make whatever he wants – but it is worth keeping in mind from a general audience perspective.

Horror fans will know what to expect; if you walk into this version of The Mummy expecting the Brendan Fraser, swashbuckling version of The Mummy, you will be sorely disappointed.

In the politest possible terms, Cronin’s version of The Mummy is worth skipping if you don’t like body parts falling off or seeing skin ripped off.

If nothing else, this is a movie with a vision and doesn’t feel like it has been studio-noted to death; this is Cronin’s version, warts and all.

After being hand-picked by Sam Raimi to direct Evil Dead Rise (and the film becoming a box office hit in 2023 after nearly being punted straight to streaming), this movie announces Cronin’s graduation to the mainstream.

Cronin’s name is all over the marketing for this film – impressive, considering this is his third feature film – and the Dublin man is now being sold on the same level as a Jordan Peele or a Zach Cregger.

The novelty of seeing a Dublin director having their name on buses in cities across the world should be celebrated – Ireland finally has a horror auteur we can claim.

As for the film itself? Great, provided you see it on an empty stomach.

If you liked the gore fest of Evil Dead Rise, then you’ll find a lot to like here; with a bigger budget to play with, Cronin displays a lot of confidence and playfulness here.

In the marketing, the movie has made it clear that it’s not going for the Indiana Jones-style action movie vibes of the Brendan Fraser movies, and if anything, this version of The Mummy is a better version of The Exorcist than the disastrous one we got in 2023.

Next year marks 10 years since whatever the hell that Tom Cruise version of The Mummy was trying to be, and while that particular movie was a bloated $200 million mess, the version we have now feels more back to basics; instead of Tom Cruise outrunning a sandstorm, we get a haunted house movie with Jack Reynor.

The crux of the movie concerns a young girl named Katie vanishing into thin air while her journalist father (played by Reynor) and nurse mother mourn her.

After not receiving any help from the Egyptian authorities, the family moves back to the United States, and later receives a call that Katie has been found – but she’s not the same girl who went missing.

The Exorcist terrified audiences over 50 years ago because the core concept of a little girl being possessed by a demon is a uniquely upsetting premise, and in the cold light of 2026, that same concept still has a lot of power.

Reynor’s desperation of trying to figure out what happened to his daughter plays into the most common fear: something is wrong with a loved one, and you can’t figure out what it is.

Cronin’s spin on mummy curses and blood pacts means that the film has more in common with The Exorcist than it does the classic 1940s versions of The Mummy.

We imagine the ratings session at the Irish Film Certificate Office was the easiest one of the year; when someone gets their face torn off by a hook in the first five minutes, an 18 rating was rubberstamped, and they broke off early for lunch.

The Substance is a decent frame of reference for this – while that film is incredibly gory and is a David Cronenberg homage, it also had the comedy bits and showbiz satire to take the edge off.

In this instance, Cronin locks the audience into a state of sheer terror, barely allowing them to breathe for most of the run time.

When Cronin lets the atmosphere build, leaving things unexplained and mysterious, the film really sings.

When Cronin feels the need to explain why weird things are happening, the movie loses the potency.

Great horror movies have a mystery at their core- Weapons is a great modern example, and the original Nightmare On Elm Street doesn’t tell you who Freddy Krueger is until an hour in – but the need to explain proceedings robs the film of some real punch.

Weapons made it into our year-end 10 last year, in large part because the central mystery was so riveting and it didn’t feel the need to explain everything about Aunt Gladys.

After you watch Weapons, you know roughly as much about Aunt Gladys as you did at the start of the movie, and that’s a great hook to leave audiences with; give the audience just enough, but not too much.

In the case of The Mummy, things are put into a neat little box.

The central mystery of the movie – what happened to Katie – is a decent hook, but leaving it unexplained and ambiguous would be more effective, like how The Exorcist is ambiguous about how Regan got possessed.

Having the characters and the audience on the same page in terms of what they do and don’t know is a lot more effective; the need to explain every little detail robs the film of its potential power.

Cronin is a terrific stylist – he loves to deploy a Brian De Palma split diopter shot and lets the camera linger in the way that Wes Craven used to love doing – but his writing always feels like the second-to-last draft, where not all the edges have been sanded off.

Cronin is trusting the audience to come along on the ghost train – why not trust them to accept the mystery, too, and leave some of it unexplained?

All in all, a film like this leaves a reviewer in an awkward spot; horror fans will lap this up, of course, but what will the general public think?

We are giving this film a recommendation, but on the caveat that you have to be a real horror hound to enjoy it; if your idea of a good night at the movies is a sad European arthouse drama where people mope around, give The Mummy a skip.