Almost Re-animated
The Egyptian mummy is dusted off one more time and sprinkled with a little Raimi.
Lee CRonin’s The Mummy
Director: Lee Cronin • Writer: Lee Cronin
Starring: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, Natalie Grace, Veronica Falcón, May Calamawy
USA • 2hrs 13mins
Opens Hong Kong April 16 • III
Grade: B-
Fans of classic horror should be warned before going into Lee Cronin’s The Mummy that more than a clever, truly modern take on a tried and true “monster” like the Invisible Man in Leigh Whannell’s 2020 The Invisible Man, this is an Evil Dead movie, and Sam Raimi would be proud. Cronin’s name is in the title to separate it from The Mummy (1932), The Mummy (’59), The Mummy (’99), The Mummy (2017) and The Mummy (another one from ’26) – you get the idea – but Cronin really stood up and waved his arms with the truly gnarly Evil Dead Rise. That film did justice to the cult franchise, juiced it for a next generation and put Cronin in the company of Osgood Perkins, Fede Álvarez and Robert Eggers. Nice.
Things start out novel and contemporary enough. Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor, the world’s worst boyfriend in Midsommar) is an American foreign press correspondant (okay, mostly contemporary) working in Cairo and trying to impress the suits at HQ enough to score an anchor job. It seems his work has paid off when he’s offered a gig in New York, but it all blows up in his face when his eight-year-old daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted, setting off the parental nightmare. The fact that Cannon and his family are in Egypt is the string Cronin uses to tie the story to traditional mummy lore – sarcophagi, wrappings, anicent languages and scarab beetles all present – but he can’t shake the Deadites of it all. The Mummy starts off flirting with The Invisible Man area, detours into Whannell’s Wolf Man-land (as in, “WTF is going on?”) and ends up back in Michigan. It’s not bad. It’s just familiar.
Puberty sucks
Cronin busts out the split diopters again when the film flashes forward eight years to the meth capital of the US (thanks, Breaking Bad), Albuquerque (played by a combination of Irish soundstage and Spain). Charlie is working at a local TV station, his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) is working as a nursing, and both are still mourning the loss of Katie, who’s never been found. Their son Seb (Shylo Molina) feels the absence of his older sister too, and Maud (Billie Roy), born after Katie vanished, dance around their parents’ simmering grief but have no idea how to deal with Katie’s sudden reappearance (now Natalie Grace). The family reunion ain’t all that.
Like he did in Evil Dead Rise, Cronin cribs from a lot of the films that have essentially written the rules of the game for possession and demon stories, among them The Omen, The Exorcist, Cronin’s own films as well as some of the modern standard-bearers for body horror (anything David Cronenberg, John Carpenter) and psychological torture (looking at you, Ari Aster). And like he did in his last film he zeroes in on a family that’s being destroyed, be it from without or within. The new and entombed Katie takes great umbrage with Larissa’s ultra-catholic mother Carmen’s (Veronica Falcón) constant praying and with Larissa’s constant fussing. Larissa is irritated by Charlie’s insistence on journalistic discovery rather than being present for their daughter. He doubles down on that after Katie has a nasty moment stemming from toenail clipping, and the Cairo detective who first investigated Katie’s disappearance, Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy, Moon Knight), comes calling with mystical details.
The first two-thirds of The Mummy play out like a spooky mystery rooted in ancient folklore and traditions, but playing fast and loose with the fundamentals of wrapping a body for eternal internment. The plot co-incidences don’t feel forced by horror standards, and the presentation of an Arabic space feels neither racist or fetishised; Zaki’s dogged work on Katie’s disappearance is actually one of the film’s strongest elements, and it would have been nice to see more of her digging up clues. And man, does DOP Dave Garbett (a lot of new Evil Dead and the forthcoming/neverending Insidious: Out of the Further) have a grand old time with sandstorms, negative space, and keeping the entire frame loaded with action – a lot of it hilarious. It helps that the cast, especially the supporting players like stealth star Billie Roy, who at 12 (!) throws down an astounding “cunt” bomb; Falcón, truly fabulous as one of those matriarchs; and Grace as the locked-in Katie go all in. Cronin earns that Cat III tag for all the gooey gore and deliriously nasty bits – though nothing tops That Scene in Bring Her Back, with Cronin’s own cheese grater moment a close second – even as the back third of the film runs out of steam, backs itself into corners and spirals into rote, rambling demonic possession territory; we’ve seen this before. In 94 minutes. Nothing is going to top (sink?) that Tom Cruise mess from Universal’s misguided Dark Universe bullshit gimmick, so at the very least Lee Cronin’s The Mummy isn’t the worst interation of the old school monster to come down the pipe in a hot minute. It’s just been Frankensteined.