Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Lee Cronin
Starring: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Veronica Falcón
Hitchcock's Psycho is often cited as the first slasher movie but the tropes of that sub-genre go right back to the 1930s. The likes of Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees are essentially descendants of Kharis, the shambling antagonist of Universal's Mummy series of the '30s and '40s. In recent decades Universal has taken their Mummy property out of the horror genre and into the realm of blockbuster action, in a series of hit films starring Brendan Fraser and a flop headlined by the usually reliable Tom Cruise.
Lee Cronin's The Mummy comes not from Universal but from Warners, which is why it's being released as "Lee Cronin's The Mummy." Warners have returned the property to its rightful place in horror but Cronin's film has practically nothing in common with what we think of as a typical Mummy movie. There isn't a tana leaf in sight, and no lumbering gauze-wrapped baddy smashing his way through windows. This isn't your daddy's Mummy. The Mummy here is female, a gender reversal that was already done by Hammer back in 1971 with Blood from the Mummy's Tomb and in the recent Cruise flop. But the Mummy here is also a child, and so the film plays more like an Exorcist knockoff than a typical Mummy flick.
What Cronin has really done here is deliver an overblown and underwhelming big budget remake of his 2018 debut The Hole in the Ground. That modest but effective Irish production saw a child disappear, only to return possessed by some evil force. That's exactly what we get once again here, but where Cronin focussed on atmosphere and ambiguity in his debut, here he gets bogged down in unnecessary plotting, stretching his film to a patience testing 133 minutes.
While working in Cairo, TV reporter Charlie (Jack Reynor) and his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) have their lives upended when their daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted from their garden by a mysterious woman. Eight years later the couple are back in New Mexico raising their other two kids when they receive the news that Katie has been found. She's alive, but far from well. Discovered in a sarcophagus that fell from a plane crash in Egypt, Katie has been mummified, preserved for all those years like that jar of pickles at the back of your fridge. She has lost the ability to speak and is in a feral state.
You would think the scientific community would want to maybe run a few tests on Katie, but no, she's handed right back to Charlie and Larissa, who take their little Mummy back to American suburbia. It's utterly ludicrous how everyone reacts to the return of the clearly monstrous Katie. Why are the authorities so completely disinterested in this phenomenal discovery?
Strapped to her bed for her own protection, Katie (now played by Natalie Grace in make-up that appears inspired more by the "bog bodies" of Cronin's native Ireland than any Egyptian mummies) goes full Linda Blair, levitating, vomiting pea soup and spouting obscenities via the mouth of her kid sister Maud (Billie Roy), over whom she exerts some sort of mind control. You have to assume that Warners expected The Exorcist: Believer to become a big hit and that we would be in the wave of Exorcist fever right now, as there is nothing subtle in how this property has been rejigged as a poor man's take on that setup.
The pacing is soul destroying, with information that could have been relayed in a single scene stretched out over several. Its running time is a full hour longer than any entry in Universal's '30s/'40s series, but it's just as dumb as any of those movies and a lot less fun. It features one of the most insulting visits to a professor of Exposition I've ever seen, with Charlie failing to do anything with the information he's gleaned - it's solely for the sake of the audience.
The Mummy is never scary or suspenseful or atmospheric, Cronin preferring to settle for cheap grossout shtick. That most of the violence is enacted against children and elderly women makes it difficult to enjoy, even if that's your cup of tana leaf tea.
The movie's few good scenes are those set in Egypt, with May Calamawy very good as the detective on the case, though the depiction of that part of the world comes uncomfortably close to xenophobia. But the bulk of the film is set in the home of Charlie and Larissa, and the miscast Reynor and Costa's limp performances combined with writing that is more interested in plot than characters makes it impossible for us to care about this family in the way we do for those in such horror classics as The Exorcist and Poltergeist. This Mummy should have been kept under wraps.
The Mummy is in UK/ROI cinemas from April 17th.
