“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” has more in common with its filmmaker’s superior “Evil Dead Rise” than it does the Boris Karloff, Brendan Fraser, or even Tom Cruise versions of this tale. It is a relentlessly brutal movie, one that too quickly becomes monotonous in its cruelty, numbing instead of thrilling viewers. Cronin struggles to balance two films: a sort of supernatural procedural about exactly how an ancient, malevolent force found its way into a little girl, and a body-horror extravaganza about what happens to a poor New Mexico family when the aforementioned deadly tyke comes home. It’s a film that sparks to life in some of its darkly humorous beats like a wake gone bloodily awry, but those moments are too few and far between for an overlong study in how to abuse an audience.
Jack Reynor, often good but miscast here, plays Charlie Cannon, a journalist working in Cairo when the film opens, after a terrifying prologue in which a chamber housing a sarcophagus is disrupted. He lives with his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), son Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams), and daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell). One day, while Larissa is at work and Charlie is on a call, Katie goes to play with her secret friend Layla, who we discover has been giving the girl candy for days, grooming her for the unimaginable. Before you know it, Katie has been kidnapped, and an ambitious new detective named Dalia (May Calamawy) has no answer for the Cannon family. The girl has just disappeared.
Eight years later, the Cannons have moved to New Mexico and had another child named Maud (Billie Roy). (The older Sebastian is now played by Shylo Molina.) When a plane crashes to the ground, a sarcophagus is the only thing that seems untouched by the disaster. The authorities open the encasement to find the body of Katie Cannon (now played by Natalie Grace), and, well, she’s not doing all that great. They tell the Cannons that she’s “locked in,” unable to communicate, but there’s more than just a comatose child here. Katie is clearly possessed by something unfathomable, a force that has taken over her body, and is somehow able to control the world and people around her in ways that aren’t ever fully defined.
Honestly, that lack of definition is a plus, not a minus, because WAY too much of this 134-minute movie is devoted to trying to figure out what’s going on and over-explaining every step along the way. Cronin’s vision is notably better when he’s allowed to be twisted and vague, such as in a ludicrously demented scene involving blood spume on deviled eggs and vomit in a wine glass. It’s one of the few moments in the film in which it feels like Cronin is actually being allowed to lean into a sort of early Peter Jackson or Sam Raimi sense of bodily chaos.
Of course, this is not to say there isn’t plenty of the slimy red stuff outside of that scene; it’s just usually less inspired. Cronin and his team are relentless with the body horror, primarily captured in the character of Katie, one whose corporeal form seems to be degrading under the heat of the presence held within it. Flaps of skin are pulled off, appendages are chewed on, and the teeth, my God, the teeth. From the chattering of Katie’s chompers to a scene in which a character just starts ripping theirs out, this is not a film for those who are afraid of the dentist.
The biggest problem with “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is one of momentum. There are a number of little issues—Reynor’s bizarrely detached performance, inconsistent editing, a dull visual palette that lacks atmosphere—but they all come under the umbrella of a movie that can’t find its rhythm. While Calamawy is good, the investigation into what actually happened to Katie is a drag. The truth is, it shouldn’t matter what happened to Katie while she’s literally tearing her family apart. We never feel that tension, the stakes of how a mother and father would respond when the greatest threat they’ve ever faced is the child they so desperately wanted to come home again. There’s just never a weight to that idea because these characters are just pawns in Cronin’s game, his attempt to make you squirm as much as possible. You’ll definitely squirm, but mostly out of boredom.
