In the lead-up to Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, it felt like the studios behind the film (particularly Blumhouse) were doing everything possible to prepare audiences for a different kind of mummy movie. The last few iterations of the classic movie monster leaned more heavily into action spectacle and light thrills over gruesome terror. In writer-director Lee Cronin’s latest nasty work, there’s not a shred of fun to be found unless you’re the type of person who gets off on watching other moviegoers squirm. For a marketing campaign that desperately tried to make viewers aware that the star of the classic Mummy movies, Brendan Fraser, had no part to play in this feature, the inclusion of some campy fun, as seen in Fraser’s hit films, could have suited Cronin’s effort well.
Hot off the heels of his successful revival of the Evil Dead franchise with Evil Dead Rise (2023), Cronin has essentially made the same type of movie again. After their daughter Katie Cannon (Natalie Grace) is abducted in Egypt, parents Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa) spend eight years picking up the pieces of their lives to move on with the family they have left. When Katie suddenly re-enters the picture after being found trapped in a three-thousand-year-old Egyptian sarcophagus, Charlie and Larissa welcome her home with open arms, only to find the Katie who has come back to them is not the one they lost.
If the movie’s synopsis sounds more like a gripping family drama than a work of horror, that’s because the best parts of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy are the moments that don’t feel like they’re pulled directly out of demonic possession films audiences have seen countless times before. Cronin’s movie is more in line with an Exorcist or a Conjuring movie than it is with any Mummy movie. The question Cronin poses in the first 20 minutes of what happened to Katie Cannon is much more interesting than the answers he provides.
The introduction is the most frightening part of the movie because it plays into the very real fears that all parents face. Although supernatural elements play a role in Katie’s abduction, the scene remains extremely visceral and makes viewers feel disturbed in a way that differs from the rest of the feature. The scene is upsetting because of how powerless the younger Katie, played excellently by Emily Mitchell, feels in the moment. The entire movie could’ve stayed in this initial abduction, and with this family trying to fight to get their daughter back. Instead, it jumps to eight years later and immediately becomes something much more conventional.
As soon as Katie reunites with her family, it becomes clear to them that there is something wrong with her, even before she starts terrorizing them. It would’ve been fascinating to see Cronin use Katie’s condition as a metaphor to explore what it’s like for people rescued from real-life traumatic situations like sex trafficking to reacclimate into their lives and their families. However, Cronin zags into a much safer and paint-by-numbers possession narrative. Katie never becomes a character again throughout the story. Grace’s physicality, paired with the unsettling makeup and prosthetic work, makes her a menacing presence. That can only take a character so far, though.
Reynor and Costa reliably carry the narrative forward. As it becomes clearer to them that they may not be able to save their daughter on their own, no matter how badly they want to fix her, they begin to grieve all over again, taking their failings out on each other, most notably in a scene that added exactly the type of depth one looks for in a story like this. It’s the type of drama the feature could’ve benefited from featuring much more of.
When all their attempts to connect with Katie fail, and matters continue to spiral out of control, Reynor and Costa arouse empathy through their performances. Their performances make it clear how badly Charlie and Larissa want their little girl back. A particular revelation Jack has about how he’s able to communicate with Katie is one of the only moments in the film that I’d qualify as being special and earned, partly because of how it’s built up between Charlie and the younger version of Katie in an earlier scene.
The scares and gore were effective in Cronin’s last film because he made the audience care about all the characters that make up the family in Evil Dead Rise, and he made it feel like none of them were safe. While it can’t be said that no one goes unscathed in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, it never feels like any of the core family members are in real danger. They’re all tormented in very demented and grotesque ways, but their fates are never uncertain. While the gross imagery of someone ripping their skin off or chomping down on a scorpion makes viewers wince, there has to be more than that.
The film is often nasty for the sake of being nasty, just to get a reaction from the audience. Cronin isn’t playing on their emotions in these moments; he’s playing on their human nature to react a certain way when they see something disgusting or brutal, which they can encounter anywhere else. The least he could’ve done was add some campy dark humor to these moments, as he did so well in Evil Dead Rise. The seriousness of this film’s horror and gruesome elements makes them less engaging and memorable, despite how many split diopter shots attempt to engage even the most avid cinephiles.
A side plot shows Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) investigating the circumstances surrounding Katie’s disappearance and reemergence. Not much time is dedicated to the investigation, which is probably for the best, since the feature is already too long at a runtime of over two hours. If this arc were at the center of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, it could’ve potentially made for a better, more thrilling film.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is not the best adaptation of this material we’ve ever gotten, but it’s certainly nowhere near the worst (Tom Cruise may forever hold that title). It has too many promising elements to know what to do with, and it doesn’t use them in a way that works well as a whole. It’s another horror movie whose core objective is to make viewers uncomfortable. While it succeeds at this in small doses, audiences have learned many times before how great gore and unsettling moments alone do not make for a good horror movie.
Review Courtesy of Evan Miller
Feature Image Credit to Warner Bros. Pictures via The Hollywood Reporter.