Putting the writer-director’s name in the title of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy may seem like an odd choice for a filmmaker who isn’t a household name. Aside from The Mummy, Irish-born Cronin has only directed two feature films, one of which was an indie (The Hole in the Ground, 2019) and the other a late-period franchise sequel (Evil Dead Rise, 2023). Hardly marquee status stuff, but across those three films Cronin has developed enough gruesome signatures that an adjective — Croninesque, maybe? — may yet be in his future, particularly if he keeps reinventing classic movie monsters in his own style like he does here.
Cronin is particularly fascinated with dangerously unstable family dynamics: Parents who fail to protect their children, children who wish harm upon their parents, siblings torturing each other as well as Mom and Dad. All of this is present in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, whose ancient Egyptian demon (because of course there’s an ancient Egyptian demon) is named The Nazaranian, “The Destroyer of Families.” Combine that with Cronin’s fixation on bodily fluids, and you get moments like a possessed teenager drinking the embalming fluid out of her dead grandmother’s neck as shocked funeral guests look on.
