With all the jokes circulating online about the fact Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is called Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, it’s really important it was called this in order to distinguish it from The Mummy franchise starring Brendan Fraser, a new instalment of which is due in 2028. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, however, is something else entirely as it attempts to reinvent and modernise the classic monster story, bringing it to the domestic setting of TV reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor), who lives in Cairo with his wife Larissa (Laia Costa), daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell), and son Sebastián (Dean Allen Williams). Everything changes forever when Katie visits her friend at the bottom of the garden. The woman, who goes by The Magician (Hayat Kamille), has been grooming Katie for days with the help of her uninformed daughter, Layla (Aisha Laouini and May Elghety), to use Katie for a harrowing yet pressing purpose. When Charlie and Larissa report their daughter’s abduction to the authorities, they are dismissed by a senior detective while newbie Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) is more sympathetic but cannot provide the answers they are searching for. Their little girl is gone.
Eight years later, the Cannon family now live in New Mexico with Larissa’s mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcón). Sebastián has grown into a moody teenager (now played by Shylo Molina), and they’ve had another daughter called Maud (Billie Roy), who is the same age as Katie was when she disappeared. One day, Charlie gets a call informing him that Katie (now played by Natalie Grace) has been found in a sarcophagus that fell out of the sky during a plane crash. Most importantly, Katie is alive. But, you see, the thing is… well, she’s… uhh. She’s got what the doctors call locked-in syndrome, though say Katie should return to normal in a matter of weeks or months with the right care at home. When we first meet Katie, Cronin’s camera only shows parts of her: her dry, leathery skin, the cuts on her face, her thick toenails, and clenched fists. We also hear her taxing, wheezing breaths. The doctors say she has suffered extreme trauma with lack of light and malnutrition, yet she’s physically strong and healthy, but has to be sedated to keep her calm. The entire scene evokes a strong sense of discomfort as Charlie and Larissa meet their daughter after she has suffered unimaginable trauma. Charlie is desperate to know what happened to Katie and works with Dalia who is put back on the case.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a possession story at heart, more The Exorcist than The Mummy. The first time we see Katie’s face upon her return, she is being pulled up the stairs in a wheelchair by her parents, and is placed into a pink bedroom. Soon enough, she’s wearing a pink nightgown with Larissa trying to talk to her normally, which Katie doesn’t respond to. The juxtaposition is unsettling. You expect her to start saying things like “your mother sucks cocks in Hell!” and “you’re going to die up there,” and she does, but it’s more the latter than the former. Things get worse when Charlie sees that Katie’s skin is shedding, with secret Arabic messages scrawled inside, and Maud and Sebastián grow scared of Katie’s growing, unnerving presence as Larissa pushes through, trying to be a good mother and caretaker. Meanwhile, Carmen spends her time alternating between speaking to Katie normally, as though nothing is untoward, and praying for the poor girl’s soul. The Cannons largely exist in a state of denial as the audience bores witness to the growing horror of their situation.
The film itself is surprisingly visually inviting with its production design, including a gorgeous family home and various shots of nature throughout. Cinematographer David Garbett effectively lights scenes during both day and night time, which help to create the film’s atmosphere, in addition to sandstorms, smoke and fire from a plane crash, and torch light when hunting for potentially demonic secrets underground. VFX supervisor Fred Burdy and special effects supervisor Tez Palmer combine digital and practical effects to achieve many of the film’s gross and, frankly, quite disturbing scenes. There’s plenty of blood, vomit, embalming fluid, bug eating, and, of course, body horror and gore. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has a deeply terrifying premise, which means it could’ve been a deeply terrifying film had it not gone the way of Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead—though it makes sense considering Cronin directed Evil Dead Rise. Those who are in the know about this won’t be surprised by what they find here when seeing Cronin’s name attached. With some light gags throughout, the film’s last half hour becomes its most silly and exaggerated during the horror spilling out of Katie. It borders the line between the humour and unease mastered in Drag Me to Hell, which is to say that some things do still get under the skin. There are stretches where it’s actually hard to predict what crazy shit might happen next. The score is also heightened to induce and control fear, sometimes blending a menacing sound into an everyday occurrence like a hairdryer. It’s effective sometimes and annoying others.
It’s probably no surprise, then, that the film struggles in other ways to balance tone as Charlie, a rather warm and loving dad, ends up checking out emotionally. This response makes sense for the situation he’s in, but not for the film he’s in. Do something, dude! It’s interesting to get more information about who took Katie and what happened to her, but these scenes can drag—even though Cronin is sure to cut out the boring parts to help with pacing. For example, when Charlie discovers a clue, we don’t see him give it to Dalia, we see that she already has it. Calamawy’s scenes, conducting her own investigation in Cairo, are engaging, but she may as well be in a different film as it struggles to balance its threads. It almost doesn’t matter what happened to Katie when she’s currently at home, possessed by a scary entity who is infecting those around her like a disease while her family are fairly passive for most of the runtime. There are times when it feels like not a single member of the family is going to survive because there’s very little set up around how they could come back from this, which works in its favour to drive suspense but adds to the fact that no one has really been doing anything. Nothing that has amounted to much in the end, anyway. While the demon goes hard during the climax, it certainly could’ve gone much harder. But maybe that’s for the best. I mean, how much trauma can one family take? While not everything works, I didn’t find Lee Cronin’s The Mummy as bad as people are saying. It’s a fun and unsettling ride for horror lovers with a great hook, some laughs, and a few hand-over-the-mouth-in-shock moments.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in cinemas now.
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