A Title That Promises More Than It Delivers
Canada's CBC has weighed in on Lee Cronin's The Mummy, and the verdict is about as grim as the film itself. The horror director — best known for Evil Dead Rise — returns with a movie that has audiences scratching their heads for all the wrong reasons. Chief among them: why is it called The Mummy when it's barely about mummies?
It's a fair question. The title conjures images of ancient Egypt, bandaged undead, Boris Karloff shuffling through shadowy corridors. What you actually get is something else entirely — a mean-spirited horror exercise that seems more interested in inflicting discomfort on its audience than delivering the creature-feature thrills the name implies.
So What Is It Actually About?
Cronin's film follows a grieving family haunted by something ancient and malevolent. There are mummies in a technical sense — preserved bodies, buried things that shouldn't move. But the film leans so hard into psychological misery and shock-value cruelty that the mummy mythology feels almost incidental, like a brand slapped on a product to guarantee an opening weekend.
The CBC review notes the film is "needlessly mean-spirited" — a phrase that cuts to the heart of what makes it frustrating. Horror can absolutely be dark, brutal, and unrelenting. The best of the genre uses that darkness purposefully. Here, the nastiness feels like an end in itself rather than a means to genuine dread or emotional resonance.
Cronin's Complicated Follow-Up
After Evil Dead Rise earned strong notices and delivered a satisfying blast of gore-soaked mayhem, expectations were reasonably high for whatever Cronin did next. He'd proven he could handle studio horror with craft and a clear point of view. The Mummy suggests he may have been given too much rope — or too little oversight.
The pacing drags. The characters are more vessels for punishment than people worth following. And the mythology, when it does show up, is handled so perfunctorily you wonder why the filmmakers bothered reaching for an established brand at all. A more honest title might have served the film better, even if it wouldn't have sold as many tickets.
Worth Seeing?
If you're a completionist horror fan who needs to see everything in the genre, The Mummy will scratch a particular itch — it's slickly made, and Cronin clearly knows how to frame a scare. But if you go in expecting a reimagined classic monster movie or even a coherent creature feature, you'll leave disappointed.
For Canadian horror fans, there's a certain melancholy in watching a filmmaker with real talent produce something this uneven. Cronin has the goods. This particular outing just didn't make good use of them.
The Mummy is now playing in theatres across Canada.
Source: CBC Arts
