Three mummies from an underground Egyptian civilization arrive in contemporary London in possession of a stolen royal ring, no understanding of credit cards, and a fundamental confusion about why everyone insists on wearing clothes. Mummies, directed by Juan Jesús García Galocha and produced with Spanish and British backing, turns this collision between ancient ceremony and modern absurdity into eighty-eight minutes of compact, efficient family entertainment — the kind that doesn’t pretend to be more than it is, and as a result earns more credit than it might otherwise receive.

Galocha’s direction is confident in a specific, useful way: he keeps the pacing tight and the visual comedy physical. The central trio of mummies — princess Nefer, reluctant groom Thut, and the young charioteer Dedi — are drawn with enough expressiveness to carry the story through its thinner patches, and the decision to stage the bulk of the film in recognizable London locations grounds the fantasy in something legible for audiences who have never considered what a mummy would make of a Tube delay. The underground Egyptian civilization is visualized with a mix of ancient grandeur and anachronistic technology that generates its own comedic logic and doubles as an efficient shorthand for the mummies’ values — ceremony, hierarchy, obligation — which the film will then subject to the relentless pressure of the modern city.

The villain, Lord Carnaby — voiced with patrician menace by Hugh Bonneville — is the film’s clearest success in character design: a collector who treats artifacts as personal property, whose obsession with ownership provides the story’s moral spine without the script needing to spell it out. Against him, Eleanor Tomlinson and Joe Thomas supply the English voices for Nefer and Thut with easy chemistry. The romantic arc develops the way these arcs are supposed to, without detour or ambivalence, which is the appropriate call for a film that has no interest in subversion. Sean Bean appears as Emperor Sekhem — the weight in his voice does the work the role needs.

What separates Mummies from the more forgettable entries in European family animation is discipline. The film has a clear tonal register, maintains it across its runtime, and exits before wearing out its welcome. The sequences staged in the London Underground, where the mummies’ ceremonial gravity meets commuter indifference, are the film’s best: they find real wit in the gap between ancient codes of conduct and a city that has already absorbed everything. The animation itself is clean and competent — not Pixar, not DreamWorks, but not pretending to be either, which is a choice rather than a limitation.

As a piece of industry evidence, Mummies is notable. Spain’s Lightbox Entertainment produced a film that works globally — that can sit on a streaming platform alongside American family animation and hold its own on merit. The jokes about cultural displacement land reliably because they’re grounded in observed specifics rather than broad strokes. The stakes, though modest by studio standards, are played straight within the film’s logic. A larger budget and longer development cycle might have pushed this toward genuinely exceptional territory. What exists is something more pragmatic: a film that knows what it is, stays inside its competence, and delivers exactly what it promises.

For families seeking animated entertainment with more personality than its modest profile suggests, Mummies earns the recommendation. It doesn’t announce an arrival so much as confirm a direction — Spain’s animated cinema has been building toward this kind of global footing for a decade, and this is the film that proves the infrastructure was worth building.