Lee Cronin’s The Mummy hits theaters on April 17.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is, for better or worse, one of the saddest, funniest, messiest, and above all, meanest horror flicks you’re likely to see this year. It almost defies belief that a big Hollywood studio would release it as a spring tentpole, when it feels like the kind of vicious oddity that might premiere at a midnight genre fest before disappearing on a boutique streaming site. And yet, Warner Bros. has not only rolled out the red carpet for Cronin — whose Evil Dead Rise is in the process of spawning numerous standalone sequels — but has rightly put his name above the title too. The film is not only specific to Cronin’s fixations, but benefits greatly from his signature visual verve, which works wonders even when the 133-minute runtime stretches on a bit too long.
Thankfully, The Mummy gets better as it goes. The story of an American family whose young daughter is kidnapped in Egypt, only to later emerge from a sarcophagus, it’s frontloaded with heavy themes and backloaded with horror-comedy stylings. As long as you can wade through its saggy middle section, you’re in for a decent time. It also has no connection beyond its title to either the Boris Karloff originals, the Brendan Fraser swashbucklers, or the short lived Tom Cruise-led Dark Universe (“Thanks for bringing me back from the dead, dude!”), so there’s no homework required. In fact, it isn’t so much a mummy movie as it is the umpteenth clone of The Exorcist, so if you’re amused by little girls blurting curse words, then Cronin has your number.
And yet, it isn’t as simple as just another derivation. Cronin is only three films deep, but his preceding works (Evil Dead Rise and The Hole in the Ground) both circle the idea of the family unit being warped and bastardized, a concept he wields much more freely here. The Mummy begins with an Egyptian family of five enjoying Arabic hip hop as the father, his young daughter and two sons sing along jovially, before the mother — played intimidatingly by Hayat Kamille — shuts them down. In Cronin’s cinema, there’s nothing scarier than a mother’s steely glare, as a figure you ought to recognize sheds their warmth in favor of something cold and uncanny.
Before long, the prologue reveals that this Arab family’s farmhouse conceals something ancient beneath its floorboards, a dark tomb from which harsh knocking sounds begin to emanate, leading to an exciting title drop on par with Cronin’s Evil Dead film. Soon after, we’re introduced to our protagonists: Cairo news reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor), his mischievous son Sebastián (Dean Allen Williams), his conscientious girl-scout daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) and his pregnant nurse wife Larissa (Laia Costa). They are, for the most part, fun and ordinary, and they plan to move back to the U.S. before long, but something isn’t quite right outside their back gate.
Katie, it turns out, has been repeatedly bribed with candy by a mysterious adult woman — the very same mother from the prologue — and by the time Charlie discovers the empty wrappers in Katie’s bedroom, she’s whisked away in broad daylight. He gives chase through the streets of Cairo, but in true Mummy fashion, a sandstorm provides cover for the kidnapping. A local missing-persons detective, Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), is driven to find Katie, but there are no leads whatsoever. Eight years go by. The Cannons relocate to New Mexico, where they move in with Larissa’s religious mother Carmen (Verónica Falcón), only to suddenly receive a phone call from the U.S. embassy in Egypt, telling them their daughter is alive.
What happened to Katie is a mystery, but all that’s known is a plane transporting an ancient coffin mysteriously crashed while somehow leaving the tomb intact, within which Katie was found bound and severely malnourished — practically dead. She’s played, through the rest of the film, by Natalie Grace, and when her parents retrieve her, she doesn’t speak. Her limbs are contorted. Her skin is rubbery. Her nails are brittle. Her face looks oddly asymmetrical, and her sudden movements once she’s transported back to New Mexico are jolting and intimidating. Sebastián, now older and played by Shylo Molina, keeps his distance, while Katie’s new younger sister Maud (Billie Roy) approaches with curiosity. As you might expect, things start going bump in the night, both independently of Katie, and because she’s constantly escaping her wheelchair as she seems to prefer dark, quiet corners.
As Zaki gets back on the case in Cairo to drive the plot (in a pleasant surprise, about a third of the film is in Arabic), Charlie and Larissa become the emotional focus as the question of what transpired continues to loom. It’s here that the movie begins subtly suggesting the kinds of traumas Katie may have undergone, though the major question it gestures towards, but never fully speaks out loud, is the possibility of sexual trauma. Words like “grooming” and “human trafficking” come up as possibilities, even though something supernatural may have been the true culprit. And yet, it’s this lack of clarity that ends up driving the movie’s plot. The lack of certainty leads Charlie to investigate what might have happened, as though answers will make things easier. Meanwhile, Larissa pretends everything is back to normal, and all the while, Katie remains unable to communicate, even though her eyes betray a quiet desperation to be understood. Once again, robbing the family unit of its familiar connections becomes the whole basis for Cronin’s story.
It’s oddly refreshing, in the landscape of “elevated” horror, to witness a film where trauma is more than just a metaphor hovering in the distance, but rather, a central enigma that erodes a family from within. The real tragedy of The Mummy isn’t just that Katie can’t put words to what was done to her, but that her parents haven’t the slightest conception of how to approach it. But of course, a quiet, considered film The Mummy is not, and it isn’t long before Cronin’s energetic stylizations begin transforming it into a discomfiting sensory experience.
For instance, he doles out split diopter shots with reckless abandon, though not just for the sake of clarifying information. Katie is usually in the foreground of these, and she appears bloated in the process, as though her mere presence were obfuscating her parents’ field of view. The family’s insistence on sitting by Katie’s side and chatting nonstop to keep her company becomes a genuinely hilarious excuse for the violent fates that befall them — especially the grandmother, whose piety doesn’t protect her, as it might in a more traditional exorcism movie. And most of all, quick shots of mouths chewing and bodily fluids escaping orifices make the film feel sickly. By the time the possession aspect finally ramps up, things fly off the handle in wonderfully silly ways. Little of what you’ll see is new, but it’s assembled with a throw-everything-at-the-wall energy that turns The Mummy into an amusing exorcism pastiche, filled with great performances from young actors who undoubtedly had a blast on set.
But how do these gonzo delights gel with the film’s more serious undertones of sexual trauma? Unsettlingly, to say the least. The Mummy, although it’s interested in giving its unspoken horrors an icky (but ultimately, digestible) form, isn’t nearly as concerned with the more realistic contours of Katie’s experience. She’s seldom more than an emotional deadlock for Charlie to resolve, which can be a hard pill to swallow, but the question of how far the movie will take its rape metaphor is one that’ll remain for much of the runtime. The answer, surprisingly, involves Cronin charging right up to the line of what might be acceptable to depict in a studio movie (and really, to film at all), and all but cementing this allegory leaves the movie with an especially vile conclusion, albeit one that’s at least in line with its vicious idiosyncrasies.
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