This Mummy belongs to the director of Evil Dead Rise, produced by James Wan and Jason Blum, and it shares approximately nothing with the swashbuckling action-adventure version of the property that colonized most people’s childhoods.

Cronin’s unique vision is not for the squeamish or faint of heart. His film is an unabashedly grisly horror spectacle that often shoots for the kind of gross-out gore that will leave some audiences elated and others repulsed. It’s very much in the Evil Dead vein of horror yet with an eerie mystery element attached and a strong family component.

Lee Cronin cites Poltergeist (1982) and Se7en (1995) as influences on the story. That combination ; a family torn apart by the theft of a child, and the slow methodical unraveling of a mystery whose answer is worse than ignorance is exactly the DNA of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. It is a film about abduction, guilt, possession, and the specific horror of getting back the thing you lost only to discover it came back wrong.

And it is, beneath all the black vomit and shed skin and scarabs emerging from fruit, a film about a father who failed once and is determined to never fail again even if keeping that promise costs him everything.

A Black Pyramid Under a Family Home

Before the Cannon family’s story begins, the film opens with a prologue in Aswan, Egypt, that establishes the mythology at the movie’s core. A man, a woman, their two sons and daughter Layla arrive home to find their pet bird dead.

The parents go to the cellar, which is revealed to be built on a buried black pyramid. Inside, a black basalt sarcophagus contains mummified human remains that begin moving, and the father is killed by a supernatural force.

The woman who orchestrated this and who survives it ; is referred to throughout the film only as the Magician, played with cold, ritualistic certainty by Hayat Kamille. She is not a villain in the conventional sense, at least not initially. She is a custodian, the latest in a long line of inheritors of an obligation she did not choose: the containment of something ancient and catastrophically dangerous.

The dead bird. The dead mummy. A new vessel is needed. The Magician has a plan.

The Cannon Family

In Cairo, investigative TV reporter Charlie Cannon lives with his pregnant wife Larissa and their children Katie and Sebastián. Katie is friends with Layla ; the Magician’s daughter m a detail the family has no reason to consider suspicious.

Charlie is on assignment in Cairo, and with him are his pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and their two children. From the outside, this is a family in a temporary state of dislocation ; a working journalist, a supportive wife, two children navigating an expatriate childhood with the particular resilience of kids who adapt because they have to.

The morning of the abduction is ordinary. Katie is visited by the woman from Aswan, known as the Magician. She identifies herself as Layla’s mother and uses candy to lure Katie away before kidnapping her. Charlie gives chase but loses them in a sandstorm.

The sandstorm is the film’s first properly supernatural beat not a coincidence of weather but the Magician’s cover, summoned or exploited to swallow the evidence of what just happened. Katie is chosen for a simple and old reason: she is innocent and young. The ritual requires purity of vessel. It requires someone with enough life ahead of them that the demon inside cannot easily exhaust the host body in years rather than decades.

Charlie watched his daughter disappear into a wall of sand and could not follow. That failure ; specific, physical, irreversible will define the next eight years of his life.

The Cannons in Albuquerque

Eight years pass with the family now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico with Larissa’s mother, Carmen (Verónica Falcón). Charlie, Larissa, Sebastián (Shylo Molina) and their youngest daughter Maud (Billie Roy) struggle to remain hopeful that Katie is still alive.

Meanwhile in Cairo, the guilt-driven Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) leads her own police investigation to track down the person responsible for Katie’s abduction.

The film shows us what their lives look like before Katie is discovered, and though there is still warmth and love, they remain impacted by her absence. Larissa has carefully maintained Katie’s room and still goes to spend time there.

Charlie clearly harbors some frustration over where his career has gone, after his dream job in New York was seemingly derailed by this tragedy. Their son Sebastián feels constricted by his parents’ fearfulness, which is causing him to miss out on a school trip to Europe.

The Cannon family is not a family that has healed.

They are a family that has learned to function around a wound. Carmen, Larissa’s mother, provides the warmth that the parents are too hollowed out to consistently provide. Larissa and Charlie remain married, but a quiet fault line of blame runs between them ; she holds him responsible, not because she has accused him, but because he has accused himself so thoroughly that the accusation hangs in the air between them permanently.

Dalia Zaki is the film’s most interesting supporting character: a detective who took Katie’s case personally, who has spent eight years in a state of professional and moral guilt, pursuing a lead that has never materialized into something concrete.

The guilt-driven Detective Dalia Zaki leads her own police investigation to track down the person responsible for Katie’s abduction. May Calamawy plays her with the exhaustion of someone who has never let themselves stop, and when the case breaks open, the relief and horror arrive simultaneously.

Alive in a Sarcophagus

The call comes from the United States embassy in Cairo. Katie has been found alive in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus. Now played by Natalie Grace, the 17-year-old Katie was discovered in a catatonic state, severely malnourished and with clear signs of severe trauma.

After arriving in Cairo, Charlie and Larissa are both shocked and heartbroken at the sight of their daughter’s gnarled hands, jagged nails, dry cracking skin, and blank stare.

The condition of Katie’s body tells a story before the film fills in the mythology. The gnarled hands, the skin that looks ancient on a seventeen-year-old girl ; this is not the physical evidence of eight years of ordinary captivity. This is something else.

The doctors treat it as extreme trauma; Charlie and Larissa treat it as a medical problem to be solved with love and home comforts. Both are catastrophically wrong about the nature of what they’re dealing with.

The doctor tells Katie’s parents that her vitals are good and she’s physically strong. But it may take the comforts of home to give her the kind of psychological help she needs. So Charlie and Larissa take her back to Albuquerque, hoping a sense of family normalcy may bring their daughter back.

They are, in this moment, doing exactly what loving parents would do. They are also, unwittingly, transporting an ancient demon across an ocean and releasing it into a residential neighborhood in New Mexico.

The Nasmaranian: What Came Home With Katie

The film’s mythology is its most original contribution to the Mummy canon, and it is genuinely worth unpacking because the creature’s specific nature is what gives the horror its thematic resonance.

Through the testimony of Layla and the discovery of a videotape recorded after the kidnapping, it’s revealed that the girl’s body is now host to an ancient evil known as the Nasmaranian. Thousands of years ago, the so-called “Destroyer of Family” would move from person to person, possessing them and turning their loved ones against each other.

The Nasmaranian was widely present in the stories of its era, but after a certain point, it faded into obscurity.

The name ; the Destroyer of Family is not incidental. This is a demon whose specific supernatural function is the dismantling of the human unit that provides its hosts with the most comfort and safety. It doesn’t simply possess and murder. It possesses and corrupts using the possessed person’s body as a weapon against the people they love most, maximizing psychological damage before the carnage begins.

At some point in the distant past, the Magician’s ancestors performed a ritual that trapped the creature in a single, living body, which was then wrapped in strips of cloth featuring protection spells and interred in a sarcophagus housed in the belly of a black pyramid. In the present day, that resting place now sits beneath the Magician’s family home.

The eldest child of each generation is tasked with protecting it, and if the body shows signs of failing, the ritual must be performed again.

The Magician stated this had occurred more than 80 times since her family first came to act as guardians of the demon’s sarcophagus.

Eighty human beings, across the span of recorded history, used as living prisons for a single evil force. The Magician’s family is not a cult so much as an inherited custodianship ; an obligation passed down through generations with no option for resignation, bending morality across centuries to satisfy a responsibility nobody asked for.

New Mexico Under Siege

Back in Albuquerque, the horror begins the way the best possession films always begin not with spectacle, but with wrongness. Katie’s body is the trap of the demon Nasmaranian. Her siblings are eventually possessed, and her parents are nearly murdered.

When Katie is first reunited with her parents, doctors warn them that she is experiencing high levels of distress, resulting in violent bursts of self-injury. For this reason, they keep her sedated, making her mobility very limited.

In the early stages of her time at home, this dynamic continues. Katie proves wickedly fast whenever her sedative wears off, and though she takes plenty of opportunities to terrify or hurt others, she’s often discovered by Charlie viciously attacking herself.

Horror fans will recognize the self-mutilation as a genre staple ; The Exorcist, the Evil Dead films but Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has something more specific and structurally interesting going on. The game shifts when Larissa accidentally tears a chunk of skin off Katie’s leg while attempting to trim her toenails. This provokes another burst of violence, but more importantly, it leads to Charlie’s discovery that the discarded skin contained pieces of the cloth she was buried in, layered together and covered in writing.

The protection spell is not external to Katie’s body. It is baked into her skin itself. Being awakened and released from the sarcophagus is not the same as being freed ; the protection spell exerts its effects through the skin. This is likely why, when the body becomes as decayed as the first mummy, the demon is at risk of escape.

So, Katie’s self-harming is actually an attempt to remove the spell bindings, which still exert their effects over the Nasmaranian. This would explain why the demon’s power seems to grow after Larissa’s accident, and why, during the finale, it can fully unleash chaos after shedding most of Katie’s remaining skin.

This is genuinely clever mythology: the monster’s prison is literally the child’s body, and every act of violence against herself that horrifies the parents watching is the demon trying to break out of its own cage. The horror of watching your returned daughter harm herself lands differently when you understand what it actually means.

His cruel methods of supernatural torment, manipulation, and brutal violence become noticeable when Katie’s grandmother Carmen dies. The Nasmaranian, true to its title, begins with the people most likely to provide comfort and stability. Carmen’s death is the pivot point from “something is wrong with Katie” to “something is in Katie that is going to destroy this entire family.”

The Lure, the Scarab, and the Videotape

As the supernatural siege intensifies, the film’s detective thread — Detective Zaki’s parallel investigation in Cairo — begins to converge with the family’s horror in New Mexico.

Katie’s kidnapping was planned well in advance. After a long time of Layla becoming Katie’s secret friend and supplying her with candy, enough trust was built that the Magician was able to lure the girl in. After first giving her more of the same candy and showing her a harmless magic trick, the Magician performs real magic.

Pulling out a nectarine ; grown on her family’s farm , she chants a phrase that causes a scarab to emerge from the fruit and jump down Katie’s throat.

The nectarine detail is beautiful and horrible.

The Magician has been cultivating this relationship through sweetness, building trust with fruit from the same farm that sits on the black pyramid. Everything in Katie’s kidnapping was prepared with the patience of someone who has done this before — or whose family has done this before eighty times, handing down the technique like a recipe.

Charlie had sent Zaki a correspondence he obtained from Katie clacking her jaw. It was Morse code ; a sign his real daughter was still alive inside. It pointed to Layla. This detail ; that the real Katie is still in there, still conscious, still fighting, using her own body’s involuntary movements to send her father a message , is the film’s most affecting concept. The girl has been a prisoner in her own body for eight years, and when the chance arrives to reach her father, she finds a way.

Zaki uses the clues, locates Layla’s family, and infiltrates the cottage. Zaki shoots an aggressive Magician, appearing to kill her, and pursues an older Layla. Thankfully, Layla switches sides to assist the detective and enlighten her on the cult she’s in, using a home video.

The videotape , a cliché the film leans into with enough self-awareness to get away with it ; shows the night of the ritual: the Magician and her family wearing masks, chanting an incantation, and transferring the demon as a torrent of black liquid from the original decayed mummy’s mouth into Katie’s.

She was meant to stay in the sarcophagus for as long as the evil spirit remained safely imprisoned in her, but with the Egyptian government planning to flood the valley that houses their farm, the family had no choice but to try and move the sarcophagus.

That attempt ended with the deadly plane crash that killed Layla’s brothers and resulted in Katie’s discovery.

The logistics of evil, in this film, are finally human-scaled: the Nasmaranian was on track to stay contained indefinitely, but bureaucratic infrastructure development ; a flood project, a valley to be submerged , forced a logistical problem that ended with a plane crash and a free demon in a teenager’s body in New Mexico. The mundane grinding against the ancient, and the ancient winning.

The Finale

The final act delivers what Lee Cronin has been building toward ; a full-scale Nasmaranian unleashing once the remaining protection-spell skin has been shed. She attacks her parents and Dalia, beating Charlie and forcing a scorpion into Dalia’s throat.

Natalie Grace, throughout the film’s second and third acts, delivers a performance of remarkable physical and psychological commitment.

Natalie Grace steals the show as Katie. They put that poor girl through the ringer, and Grace just goes all in on it. The physicality demanded is extraordinary ; the gnarled movements of a body at war with its inhabitant, the sudden shifts between the demon’s cold malice and the occasional terrible moment where you can see the real Katie surfacing briefly before being suppressed again.

The ritual reversal , speaking the incantation from the Magician’s recording to transfer the Nasmaranian out of one body and into another is the film’s climactic mechanism. By reciting the words from the Magician’s recording, the Cannons and Detective Zaki are able to transfer the Nasmaranian from Katie into Charlie, renewing its binding. Katie not only survives this ordeal, but seems to be herself again and is gradually healing.

Charlie sacrifices himself to save Katie by taking on the Nasmaranian himself, protecting his daughter the way he was unable to do the first time.

This is the film’s thematic center, delivered with the full weight of everything the first two acts built: eight years of guilt, a marriage fractured by a single moment of failure, a man who has spent every day since Katie’s disappearance trying to be the person he couldn’t be in that Cairo backyard. The ritual doesn’t save Katie.

Charlie’s willingness to take the demon into himself saves Katie. He walks into the same horror he let swallow his daughter and does it voluntarily, eyes open.

The Ending Explained

Charlie is being held inside a chest in the Cannons’ basement, where the family seem to visit him regularly , very different from the heavy-duty sarcophagus that was concealed with the utmost caution. He is also, as proven by his Morse code communication with Katie, definitely conscious in there.

There is no magic scarab, and no way to administer sedatives without opening the box. It’s unclear just how long this makeshift prison could hold the evil trapped within it.

The image of Charlie in a wooden chest in the family basement ; the family dropping by to visit, presumably maintaining some form of connection to the conscious man inside is the film’s most unsettling domestic horror note.

He is technically alive. He is technically present. He is also hosting an ancient demon whose binding is considerably less sophisticated than the ritual mechanism that held it for thousands of years. The entire situation is a ticking clock dressed up as a resolution.

But Larissa is not interested in long-term containment strategy. Larissa surprises the Magician in her prison cell, with Zaki and a corrupted Charlie in tow. It becomes clear that, as revenge for Katie’s abduction, they intend to transfer the Nasmaranian from Charlie into her.

Larissa is finally able to see her three children playing together peacefully, and is finally able to forgive her husband and sets out to free him by punishing the one person she can’t forgive.

It is an ending of just desserts that is also, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, potentially catastrophic.

Though it will save Charlie, it’s unclear what the Cannons intend to do with the Magician after this ritual, and this kind of thinking isn’t really what the movie is after with this scene. But given how little we actually know about all this, it’s worth wondering whether this is a smart choice. There must be a new tradition of containing the Nasmaranian from here on out, and eliminating the one person on Earth who knows the most about the previous one seems like a tremendous risk.

At the same time, it may not matter , what if putting the demon in the body of a woman who already knows magic only makes it impossible to ever trap it again?

The Magician’s tattooed hands, in this final sequence, recall previous Mummy movie iconography in what feels like a deliberate visual rhyme: the woman who trafficked in ancient evil is now the vessel for it. Whether this is poetic justice or the worst possible outcome handing the Nasmaranian to the one living human who has the deepest knowledge of how to use it , the film leaves deliberately unresolved.

The Nasmaranian is the “Destroyer of Family,” and indeed does many awful things to defile the bond between the Cannons. What the Magician does, ritual aside, is much more realistic. In the world of the film, she is as worthy of the Nasmaranian’s moniker, and their being combined is the demon finding its rightful resting place.

What the Film Is Really Doing

As much as this is a fun, gross thrill-ride, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is quite upfront with what it’s really about: family.

The Nasmaranian is called the Destroyer of Family. It is also, in structural terms, the film’s externalization of what the Cannon family has been living with for eight years without any supernatural assistance: guilt as a corrosive force, absence as a wound that deforms everything around it, the specific anguish of a parent who couldn’t protect their child in the one critical moment that counted.

Charlie didn’t lose Katie to ancient evil. He lost Katie because he was inside making a phone call while she was in the backyard. That is the failure ; mundane, irrecoverable, the kind that doesn’t get better with time, only quieter. The demon simply weaponizes and externalizes what was already destroying this family from the inside.

Lee Cronin goes for the jugular with this wonderfully warped reimagining that is more than a simple retread of the various other Mummy films. It’s a movie that delights as it disgusts, which will be right up the alley of certain horror audiences.

The Blumhouse/Atomic Monster combination ; Jason Blum’s genre efficiency and James Wan’s mythology-building instincts gives the film its commercial spine. Lee Cronin’s identity as a filmmaker , the commitment to bodily horror, the Evil Dead lineage that runs through every frame gives it its texture. Cronin clearly has a knack for the grim, gory, and gooey.

Whether this constitutes a franchise launch is the question the ending is clearly designed to leave open. The Nasmaranian is not destroyed.

It is transferred, to a new host, in a basement in New Mexico, with no established mythos for what comes next. The Magician who knew everything about containing it is now its vessel. Layla, the only other living person with institutional knowledge of the ritual, is presumably somewhere in Cairo trying to put her life back together.

The Evil Dead universe connection ; teased at in post-screening comments from Cronin himself would suggest that the black pyramid and the Nasmaranian may eventually encounter the Kandarian demons of the Evil Dead mythology.

Ancient Egyptian demons, Kandarian demons, ancient Sumerian texts bound in human flesh and inked in blood all connected. That would be either the most ambitious horror universe expansion since the original Universal Monsters, or an overcrowded mythology that collapses under its own weight. Given what Cronin built here, the optimistic reading seems more warranted.

Final Verdict

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is exactly what its name promises: a Lee Cronin film wearing a Mummy costume, which means practical effects that will genuinely disturb you, a possession mythology that is more carefully constructed than the genre typically demands, and a family drama underneath the body horror that gives the carnage actual emotional stakes. It is not the most plausible film. It does not care about being the most plausible film.

It’s hard to dwell on that when the movie is consciously pushing itself to such bonkers places. The fully committed cast, gnarly makeup and effects, and stellar camerawork and sound design puts an eerie exclamation point on this satisfying genre gem.

Jack Reynor carries the weight of Charlie’s guilt with the authenticity the role demands. Natalie Grace performs what may be the most physically punishing lead performance of 2026 with complete commitment.

May Calamawy anchors the film’s procedural thread with intelligence and earned emotion. And Natalie Grace’s final moments ; Katie, scarred and recovering, watching her siblings play , land with the quiet devastation of a horror film that remembered, against all genre odds, to make you genuinely care whether the child lived.

She lived. Her father is in a chest in the basement. The demon is in a prison cell in Cairo, wearing the face of the woman who created the problem in the first place.

That is not a happy ending. It is a very, very Lee Cronin ending.

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