A Mummy movie that isn’t a Mummy movie at all, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a savage and gory amalgamation of The Exorcist and Evil Dead that is impressive in craft yet lacking in originality.
There is something disingenuous about this latest incarnation of The Mummy franchise. From its portrayal of antagonist to the horrors depicted throughout the films’ two-hour 14-minute runtime, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a demonic-possession movie wrapped in mummy garb. One running theory is that leftover ideas from Blumhouse Films’ scrapped Exorcist trilogy made its way into this Mummy movie and it is one that makes sense. Regardless, the combination of “Lee Cronin” and “The Mummy” is comparable to “Colonel Sanders’ McDonalds” and has just as many nutrients.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy begins in Cairo, Egypt, where American news correspondent Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) lives with his pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and their two children. When oldest child Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted, the heartbroken Cannon family movie back to their New Mexico home, where eight years later they receive word from Cairo that Katie (now played by Natale Grace) has been found alive inside a black sarcophagus, resulting in substantial physical and mental trauma that should “heal over time”. Instead, a plague of violence overcomes the Cannon household as Katie’s homecoming brings hell with it.
Those who have seen Evil Dead Rise know that Irish director Lee Cronin serves his horror ghastly and extra-bloody, and that is very much what he delivers in his version of The Mummy. It is a form of horror filmmaking that Cronin does well, (literally) digging into the skin of his characters and letting the blood (and guts) run free with giddy, snarling delight. Sometimes it can be too much, with one scene where Laia Costa’s mother clipping the gnarly toenails of her feral daughter brings with it a gross-out, crunchy, squirminess that would give the ToeBro nightmares.
It begs the question: just how did this combination of film-brand and filmmaker get approval? The key components of a Mummy film - vengeance driven antagonist fuelled by tragedy; a sense of the exotic in its environment; supernatural horror that is chilling yet rarely grotesque – are all thrown in the woodchipper and replaced with a more exploitative aesthetic that belongs to a different horror franchise.
If viewed only as a demonic possession movie, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy does have its strengths. Natalie Grace successfully follows in the footsteps of Linda Blair (The Exorcist) and Jennifer Carpenter (The Exorcism of Emily Rose) in delivering an unsettling horror performance that fills the screen with dread; cinematography from David Garbett (The Astronaut) thankfully strays away from having this demonic-possession nightmare hide in the dark, opting for a golden-brown hue instead; and the creature make-up effects from Arjen Tuiten (Wonder) are incredibly effective.
But is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy scary? No, not really. The demonic-possession sub-genre is as tropey as they come and Cronin leans into those tropes at a regular click. Vomiting green goo? Check. Crawling on the ceiling? Check. Darling little girl cursing a storm? Check.
The only thing unconventional about this demonic-possession movie is that it’s called The Mummy. Then again, it isn’t a Mummy movie at all.
