Lee Cronin’s Mummy blows the dust off this horror staple with an Evil Dead-ified rush of body horror, child-endangerment nastiness and demonic contamination that gives the film a strong sickly charge and a couple of decent kills, even if it has a slightly hollow core, a splash of orientalism, and a tendency to lean more grisly than truly scary.
★★★
There is something unapologetically nasty about Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (to give it its full, official title). Rather than dusting off the old adventure template and hoping a familiar title will do the rest, Cronin drags the material into the same splattery domestic arena that powered Evil Dead Rise. This is not a stately curse movie, nor a swaggering action-horror throwback. Instead, Cronin brings us a supernatural spatter-fest family infection film, as an ancient evil enters the home via a daughter, spreads between family members, and turns domestic spaces rancid. This is effectively Lee Cronin’s Poltergeist II. The mummy myth survives mostly as somewhat Orientalist window-dressing for this contamination-themed possession shocker.
Katie, a young American girl, is snatched from the garden of her Cairo home where dad Jack Reynor has been stationed as a news reporter. Her abductor is a creepy Egyptian lady (Hayat Kamille) proferring a red nectarine and coming across like the wicked switch from Snow White. When Katie is found alive eight years later, in a sarcohophas retrieved from the wreckage of a plane crash, something is clearly wrong with her – but her mother (Laia Costa) insists on keeping her in the family home to recover.
What follows is a gloopy mystery-thriller, as a process of demonic infection draws loved ones under its spreading influence, turns them on each other, and reduces the house to a site of rot, panic and bodily violation. This is where the director runs riot, with a brutal bloody horror built from the degradation of intimacy itself.
Cronin wears his influences pretty openly. The Poltergeist films shape his film’s architecture, with an American nuclear family invaded by evil from outside, the home as battleground, the father pushed toward the role of restorer, and a wise female outsider bringing knowledge the family lacks. The Exorcist is there in the possessed child, the ancient force unearthed from biblically resonant ground, the trapped humanity flickering through possession, and more. There’s even the gloopy liquid transmission of Prince of Darkness and the face-smashing, ceiling crawling antics of Hereditary.
For its first stretch, though, the film carries an unpleasant racial charge. The family is menaced by a child-snatching Egyptian figure in a way that brushes up against an old panic fantasy: the foreign other as abductor, corrupter and threat to the family line, uncomfortably close to the same imagination that turned “gypsies” into stock figures of child theft in European folklore.
The film somewhat mitigates that initial ugliness as it goes on. Egyptian investigator May Calamawy emerges as a real force for good (effectively the Zelda Rubinstein analogue), and ultimately the film’s clearest hero, which softens the crudity of the opening even if it does not fully erase it. (Even then through, there’s an odd hauntological sheen to things in the details. Despite being set in the present day, Calamawy uses a 1980s style computer terminal to do her investigating. Even when it comes to IT, it seems, Egypt is kind of backward.)
The real sell here is the gunk – the degradation of flesh and blood. The film excels in its texture, with Cronin much better at disgust than suspense, at making you recoil than at making you dread. Bodies convulse, leak, deform and split with queasy conviction. Bugs run into mouths and rupture out of people, teeth and flesh and ripped from bodies… this is a properly gory studio horror film, and it has the same fuck-them-kids charge that gave Evil Dead Rise some genuine bite. Children are not protected here. They are imperilled, corrupted and used as part of the film’s shock tactics, with a nastiness that gives the film much of its energy.
Calamawy is great, elevating veery scene she’s in, and the child actors do a lot the heavy lifting – especially Natalie Grace as Katie and Billie Roy as her initially-winsome little sister Maud. In a film always threatening to reduce itself to possession mechanics and body-horror spectacle, the kids really sell the wrongness of what is happening.
Laia Costa, by contrast, is somewhat underserved, given just enough presence to suggest a richer dramatic function before the film leaves her with comparatively little to do. Jack Reynor, however, is woefully miscast. His empty expressions worked perfectly for Midsomer, but he does not convince as a dynamic can-do hero and he has no chemistry with anyone else in the cast – which is unfortunate as they are largely his character’s family. The one point he really comes to life is when he’s banging a table and roaring insults at a detective who suspects he killed his own daughter. Reynor’s agent should probably hunt around for more ‘unlikeable ass’ roles, because it’s there that he excels.
Horror fans hoping for real seat-gripping tension to the scares will be somewhat disappointed. There are effective beats and some properly nasty reveals, but it is more consistently gory and icky than truly frightening. The pacing is clearly off, grabbing at imagery rather than letting scenes breathe, and jumping quickly from event to event. At one point a child is thrown in to a door, and the next time we see her she’s in class at school. Perhaps at 2h14 the studio decided this film was already long enough.
These gaps keep the film from achieving full force. Most importantly, its family is central to the plot but there’s little feeling there. A genuinely Spielbergian version of this material would spend more time on sincere family conversation, building warmth and texture before violating it. Here, they never quite feel like people who truly love, or even especially like, one another. So while the architecture of the Spielberg-produced Poltergeist is in place, that film’s emotional force is noticeably absent.
Still, there is enough conviction here to keep Lee Cronin’s The Mummy from sliding into dead-IP sludge. Cronin knows what excites him in the material, and he pursues it with gusto. He is less interested in anthropological grandeur than in what happens when evil enters a household and rips it apart from within, and less interested in interrogating myth than in using it as a pretext to brutalize some kids while the soundtrack blares at us.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feels like a superior, much more spattery entry in producer James Wan’s Conjuringverse, with more bile, more bodily damage and more willingness to let the family unit get truly messed up. I enjoyed the spectacle, but I wonder if somewhere on the cutting room floor there lies a better paced, more fleshed-out cut – Lee Cronin’s Lee Cronin’s The Mummy.
In the meantime, thank goodness for the gore effects, for May Calamawy, and for the younger cast – truly, those kids be bugging.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in cinemas from Friday 17 April.
Whitlock&Pope 