Can a mummy be scary? That iconic revenant of Ancient Egyptian civilization is certainly fun in a beloved Saturday morning, Indiana Jones sort of way. It can also be romantic. What staple of horror better expresses the enormity of eternity than a pained face, frozen in longing beneath the sands of time? Yet are these wrapped-up wraiths ever truly spooky? Even the first, most classic mummy chiller of the screen sprang more from a fear of a curse supposedly stalking the recent excavation of King Tut’s tomb—consider it the QAnon conspiracy theory of its day—than it did terror of a well-bandaged corpse.
One senses this mystery of how to make a mummy frighten has likewise bedeviled Lee Cronin, the formidable genre filmmaker of commanding style and a nihilistic disposition. He definitely knows the ins-and-outs of revolting and unsettling an audience. His riff on Sam Raimi’s now own relatively ancient horror standard, Evil Dead Rise, is in contention for the cruelest and most misanthropic bloodbath in the Deadite canon. And when tasked with coming up on his own mummy mischief by Blumhouse Productions, Cronin ultimately lit on a novel but effective approach: do Evil Dead again, but Egyptian style.
I’m not sure Lee Cronin’s The Mummy qualifies, then, as a “real” mummy movie, whatever that might be, but it’s definitely the most grotesque, sinister, and ruthless flick I’ve ever seen featuring someone wrapped head-to-toe in linens. And at times—when you sense Cronin is stifling his oblique laughter off-screen—it’s fairly scary.
Beginning nominally in Egypt proper (which is more than we can say about a Tom Cruise movie with the similar title), Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is set in a world that is recognizably modern, chaotic, and rife with dread. One doesn’t need to whisper about ancient curses and spells to get Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa) ready to unravel. Beforehand, they’re a fairly happy, if displaced, couple who’s lived the better part of a year in Cairo while journalist Charlie chases his dream job of being a major network correspondent in New York City. Larissa is making the best of it, too, working at a nearby hospital while they split duties (and attention) on two young children, including wee Katie (Emily Mitchell).
Poor Katie. Adored but neglected just enough that her parents never notice she’s made friends with neighbors behind a fence in the garden, Katie is thus left vulnerable when one of these strangers claims to be a magician… albeit the older maternal figure seems darkly reluctant to perform a final trick that leaves the garden empty and Charlie and Larissa bereaved as their daughter vanishes into an Egyptian sandstorm.
Cut to eight years later. Charlie never got that New York job, but he and Larissa, now living with Larissa’s aging mother (Verónica Falcón) and their two remaining children, teenage Seb (Shylo Molina) and new wee daughter Maud (Billie Roy), seem to have found some equilibrium of peace in their elapsed grief. That’s why the call from Cairo hits like a thunderbolt. Katie has been discovered alive. So they say. She was also covered in bandages and seemingly left for dead in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus that was recovered, inexplicably enough, from a plane wreck. And despite being virtually catatonic and covered in scars, she is considered healthy and ready to come home to Albuquerque.
Cronin’s use of Egypt as a backdrop and a table-setter is in some ways more admirable than it is necessary. The filmmaker captures a mood that feels bustling and uneasy in the modern world, while setting the stage for an ancient primordial evil. But it’s worth noting that William Friedkin did more or less the same thing half a century ago in The Exorcist with a lot more brevity. And at heart that is very much what Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is chasing: a film where there is something deeply wrong with a little girl and the effect it’s having on her childhood home and parents.
By alluding to The Exorcist, it’s fair to say that Cronin’s Mummy is more grounded and deliberate than his brisk splatterfest in the Evil Dead sandbox three years ago. It’s also a lot longer with a 134-minute running time. But in spirit, this Mummy is still all about atmosphere, queasy aesthetics, and a brutality tha goes for heaving shock value every time. Also like Evil Dead Rise, it chronicles the destruction of a family laid low by an evil force.
As the heads of that family, Reynor and Costa give the film gravitas where possible. With his millennial beard and abstract sense of doom hanging over his head, Reynor looks like the most bewildered American in the Middle East/North Africa this side of JD Vance in Islamabad. He carries himself with a sense of disbelief that this is his life, and his despondency pairs nicely with Costa’s credible delusional fantasy that everything will be fine now that Katie’s back. Both performances suggest characters retreating from reality, which goes a long way to paper over some of the logic gaps these parents are experiencing—such as never wondering once if they should consult a child psychologist or a nearby doctor when Katie begins peeling off chunks her own skin or is found feasting on scorpions beneath their crawl spaces.
But this really isn’t a “logic” movie, nor is it a horror trying to deal with a metaphor for grief, despite grief being all around. It’s purely a visceral exercise in sadistic set pieces, which it piles up with abandon. The longer the ex-mummified Katie stays in their house, the more corrosive her shadow on the whole family becomes, with the clever suggestion that this particular brand of made-up Ancient Egyptian demonology can spread like a cold from one family member to the next.
It leads to one particularly mean-spirited sequence involving the whole family and their extended friends at a party. It’s so thunderously nasty that it will surely live on in a thousand memes. It also raises questions about why the whole family isn’t having a stronger reckoning with one another about what they’re experiencing.
But the appeals of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy remain with these surface level freak-outs. Like Katie’s countenance, they each make a mark, but also suggest that despite its epic length, this movie could have strived to do more with its premise. Ironically, it isn’t even the central family where the film most intrigues. A subplot involving an Egyptian detective (May Calamawy) as she unearths the real source of Katie’s disappearance and the nature of the dark magic that’s been placed on the child, hints at a more narratively and emotionally complex picture. On one hand, these scenes could have easily been jettisoned since at the end of the day, the viewer just needs to know it’s another demon-in-a-child movie, but on the other, they tease grim mystique and a post-colonial act of revenge that’s begging to be unwrapped. Similarly, the dread Cronin builds as Calamawy finds the source of the evil is one of the highlights of the picture.
Yet as just another layer in a more conventional movie, complete with an ending that suggests studio fingerprints, it leaves us with what is ultimately a longer possession movie. It makes for a spooky, nominal mummy, but one that settles for trinkets when there is still treasure buried up in its hills.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy opens on Friday, April 17.
