There’s a certain logic to writer-director Lee Cronin’s new version of The Mummy being called Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. It’s truth in advertising: Why not give a possessive title to a movie about the perils of demonic possession? The title is meant to push against the unstaunchable glut of anonymous slop, yet the auteur branding rings hollow—perhaps because the filmmaker in question doesn’t have a strong enough identity yet to justify it.
Suffice it to say that the 44-year-old Dubliner is not as apostrophe-ready as John Carpenter or M. Night Shyamalan—or Emerald Fennell, for that matter. He’s not a grind-household name but a technically proficient genre specialist, one who in 2023 took a plum assignment on Evil Dead Rise and aced it even more impressively than his predecessor, Fede Álvarez. Evil Dead Rise was funny and ruthless, and sufficiently disgusting—with all respect to Christopher Nolan, it featured an even better use of a cheese grater than Tenet. From the freaky cabin-in-the-woods prologue onward, Cronin showed reverence to his parent franchise without seeming intimidated; Lily Sullivan’s final girl wielding the chainsaw Bruce Campbell–style in the homestretch scanned less as a sentimental hand-me-down than a torch being passed.
Rise’s meaty sampler platter of Sam Raimi–isms was appetizing, but Lee Cronin’s The Mummy—which, for the record, was made under the code name The Resurrected—suggests reheated leftovers. In an attempt to revise a monster-movie scenario older than Boris Karloff—one that recently defeated no less than Tom Cruise—Cronin has opted to play mix master. The Mummy splices together elements of The Exorcist, Hereditary, and The Babadook, to uneven (and ultimately enervating) effect. (The masks from Ben Wheatley’s Kill List make a cameo as well.) That Cronin doesn’t draw from Stephen Sommers’s 1999 crowd-pleaser is not just a matter of respecting intellectual property lines; he wants us to know that the goofy, Spielberg-coded derring-do of that film and its sequels will not be on the menu along with all the Evil Dead–style, pulled-pork gore.
It doesn’t matter too much that The Mummy is derivative. The issue is that it’s also draggy and, notwithstanding a few bits of mean-spiritedly visceral slapstick, pretty dour. These are the unfortunate by-products of a director trying to prove himself on a bigger stage: Blood mingles with flop sweat. There are a lot of attention-getting techniques on display—long, swooping takes and De Palma–ish split diopter shots—but not a lot of momentum, and even less feeling. The most impressive thing about Evil Dead Rise was how successfully it split the difference between sadism and sentiment—it established genuinely life-or-death stakes and followed through. The Mummy, meanwhile, strives to have its lump in the throat and gouge it out, too.
The setup is sturdy enough. Stationed in Cairo as a Middle East correspondent for an American network, investigative journalist Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) dreams of a cushy, more temperate gig in New York City. When the call comes informing him he’s been transferred, he’s elated to tell his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two kids, Sebastián (Shylo Molina) and Katie (Emily Mitchell), the good news about going home. Except that Katie is nowhere to be found, having been lured out of the family’s backyard by a stranger with candy. Said stranger also apparently possesses magic powers involving scorpions and CGI sandstorms.
There is an eloquent Egyptologist (Mark Mitchinson) on hand to explain the rest, although Cronin isn’t particularly interested in such figurative pyramid schemes. Rather, he’s fascinated, as in Evil Dead Rise, by fractured family dynamics, and specifically what happens when the broken pieces get jammed back together again. In terms of screen time, Katie isn’t gone for long—a couple of anxious scenes introducing the crucial supporting character of a local detective, Dalia (May Calamawy), who’s more sympathetic than her superiors to foreigners storming her precinct and demanding answers. (“Always look at the family,” her suspicious boss tells her, underlining Cronin’s thematic focus.) Within the story, though, it takes eight years for Katie to find her way back to her folks, and even then, it’s only because of complications involving a downed airplane and its cargo. The payload: a coffin that, once opened, reveals the missing girl, barely alive and wrapped in blood-stained bandages.
“What was our daughter doing in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus?” asks Charlie—a good question that’s admittedly hard to take seriously, especially in what is meant to be a relatively realistic context. On the one hand, it’s nice to see a contemporary horror movie not populated by characters who’ve seen too many horror movies; Charlie and Larissa are grounded types who refuse to jump to supernatural conclusions in the face of overwhelming circumstantial evidence. But Cronin’s self-consciously provocative device of having the authorities float child trafficking as a logical explanation for Katie’s plight falls flat. Crucially, he fails to modulate the tone and emotions of the middle section, which finds the Cannons opting, apparently in accordance with their physician’s wishes, to bring the malnourished, catatonic Katie back to Larissa’s childhood home in Albuquerque, where coyotes howl in the night and there isn’t a neighbor around for miles.
The plan for Katie’s convalescence involves bed rest, a good pedicure, and not much else; her devoutly Catholic abuela, Carmen (Veronica Falcón), occasionally says little prayers on her behalf. The implication is that the characters are so guilty over what they perceive as their own negligence that they’re determined to keep Katie close, even though it sure seems like she could use more professional care. Every time Katie headbutts a relative or spasms Linda Blair–style on her mattress or starts whispering in tongues, Larissa gives her a sedative, locks the door, and hopes for the best.
The blinkered nature of grief, and how it can prevent people from seeing the hard truths staring them in the face—or spitting bile directly into their mouths, as the case may be—is a worthy subject for drama, and pretty much de rigueur these days in horror cinema, elevated or otherwise. (See: David Prior’s The Empty Man, still the scariest and slickest studio chiller of the decade.) Even so, it’s hard to buy that the Cannons would be so oblivious to Katie’s weird behavior, like her ratlike habit of scurrying between the wall and the crawl space, or so even-keeled about the sheer amount of blood being spilled on their bathroom tiles and carpets.
Cronin’s script moves erratically, in fits and starts. The attempt to set up a propulsive, parallel story line involving Dalia’s search for Katie’s kidnappers mostly succeeds in deflating rather than pressurizing the narrative. Among her findings: a dusty, old VHS tape helpfully labeled “KATIE.” We’re supposed to gather that the malign presence contained within Katie is a congenital home-wrecker, subliminally puppeteering the people around her and feeding off their angst.
It’s a decent idea (see also undertone, which featured an Eastern European variation of the same basic demon) that unfortunately doesn’t get the precise, devastating execution it requires. Reynor is well-cast as an anguished girl dad with the wide, anxious eyes of a guy who can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. On the whole, though, the cast members all seem to be acting in different movies, and while Natalie Grace, who plays Katie in her moldering, malevolent incarnation, is a skilled physical performer, the character design leaves something to be desired. The makeup is gross but lacks grandeur; giving a villain who’s supposed to transcend space and time standard-issue one-liners (“I’m her daddy now,” Katie hisses at Charlie) betrays a lack of imagination.
To Cronin’s credit, the last 30 minutes of The Mummy go relatively hard; they’re also, unfortunately, a bit of a mess. In a recent feature in IndieWire, the filmmaker pushed back against rumors of a troubled production (including a false story that producer James Wan walked out of an early screening), yet what’s on the screen suggests, at minimum, a project pulling itself in several different directions. In some ways, The Mummy goes pretty far for a studio movie in terms of both physical and emotional violence, but it pulls back where it counts. Say what you will about the Philippou brothers’ largely unloved Bring Her Back—a movie The Mummy resembles uncannily on a molecular level—but it goes there; the Philippous may be sadists, but at least they have the courage of their convictions. Cronin, meanwhile, revels in viciousness and then brings things in for a hug. One late twist not only undermines the notion of parenthood as an act of self-effacement and sacrifice, but it swaps out hard-won despair for a feeble—and juvenile—gesture of retribution. By compromising his own bleak vision, Cronin makes the viewer wonder why he tried to put them through hell in the first place. For all its images of burrowing insects and flaying flesh, The Mummy never remotely gets under the skin.