Lee Cronin's
The Mummy

Lee Cronin made Evil Dead Rise in 2023 and it was a genuinely effective horror film that understood exactly what it was trying to do. So when he was announced as the director of a Mummy reimagining for Blumhouse and Atomic Monster, there was reason to be optimistic. That optimism did not survive contact with the actual film.

A Western journalist family is living in Cairo. Their daughter Katie disappears during a sandstorm and is gone for eight years. When she comes back, something ancient and Egyptian has come back with her. The family returns to New Mexico. The horror follows them home.

Egypt as a Backdrop, Not a Subject

Here is the core problem. Egypt in this film is a place where bad things happen to white people. Cairo is presented as chaotic, indifferent, and vaguely threatening. The Egyptian police are depicted as incompetent, practically accusing the journalist father of being responsible for his own daughter's disappearance. The ancient Egyptian mythology the film borrows from exists purely as a delivery mechanism for Western family trauma. The country, its people, its history, its culture, are present only as a source of danger that follows the protagonists back to America.

This is a pattern in Hollywood's relationship with Egypt that goes back decades. Lee Cronin has spoken publicly about casting authentic Egyptian actors and including Arabic dialogue, and May Calamawy and Hayat Kamille are both in the film with reportedly strong scenes. But the structural problem remains. Egypt is still the origin of the curse, not the subject of the story. The Egyptian characters exist at the margins of a film that is fundamentally about a Western family.

The Film Itself

Beyond the representation issues, the film struggles to decide what it wants to be. Part possession horror, part body horror, part Evil Dead, part The Exorcist, part haunted house movie. There are scorpions and scarabs because there always are. Natalie Grace as the returned Katie is genuinely committed and puts herself through a great deal physically. Some of the practical effects work is strong. The sound design is good.

But the story is bloated at 134 minutes and the scares are generic. The film asks the audience to be disturbed every thirty seconds without earning the emotional stakes that would make any of it matter. It is gore in search of a reason to exist.

The Stereotyping Problem

It is worth being specific about what bad representation looks like here. It is not that the film is overtly hostile to Egypt or Egyptians. It is more subtle and more frustrating than that. It is the indifferent Egyptian official. The chaotic Cairo streets used as atmosphere. The ancient curse as a threat that needs to be escaped rather than understood. A country with one of the oldest and richest civilizations in human history reduced to a horror set piece for a Western family's ordeal. Egypt deserves better than this and Egyptian audiences deserved better than this.