Much like The Exorcist, the bulk of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy involves parents trying to figure out what’s wrong with their daughter.Warner Bros. Pictures/Supplied
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
Written and directed by Lee Cronin
Starring Jack Reynor, Natalie Grace and Laia Costa
Classification 14A; 134 minutes
Opens in theatres April 17
You’re probably wondering who the hell Lee Cronin is. The Irish filmmaker curiously got his name in the title Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, despite only having made two previous features (one of them being a hit Evil Dead sequel). That kind of possessive signature is typically only afforded to filmmakers whose brand has widespread recognition (John Carpenter, Tim Burton, Wes Craven, Guillermo del Toro and Tyler Perry) or titles that risk copyright infringement (Lee Daniels’ The Butler is the result of a title challenge from Warner Bros., the studio releasing Lee Cronin’s The Mummy).
Cronin is a purveyor of gore – he finds oh so many ways to make us squirm, not in terror but disgust. He’s also an adept visual stylist. There’s an appealing enough film grammar to his movie about a mummified child, with fun shot choices and clever edits, that you can reasonably argue a sentient filmmaker is in fact putting his personal stamp on this movie.
However, the rationale behind the title’s signature seems less about premature auteur branding, and more about audiences expecting another movie called The Mummy to be like the ones starring Brendan Fraser as an Indiana Jones-like figure, or the aborted attempt at rebooting the franchise with the disastrous 2017 Tom Cruise movie.
Not enough people remember the franchise that began in 1932 with Boris Karloff are to worry about confusion with those movies – not even Lee Cronin, it seems. His Imhotep-free version feels like it’s trying to get away from every mummy movie lurking before it; only an Egyptian tomb, bandages and an ancient curse connect it to that mythology. We didn’t even need “mummy” in the title, since Cronin’s version really made a mess of an Exorcist movie that also crams in bits from Don’t Look Now, Hereditary and The Evil Dead.
Much like The Exorcist, the bulk of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy involves parents trying to figure out what’s wrong with their daughter, the one with the rotting flesh tied down in her bedroom. In this case, the daughter, Katie (played by Emily Mitchell as a child and Natalie Grace as a mummy), is a kidnap victim. She’s plucked from her backyard in Egypt, where her father Charlie (Midsommar’s Jack Reynor) is on assignment as a television news reporter.
Several years later, Katie is discovered, imprisoned in a tomb that, for reasons never convincingly explained, is being transported in a plane that ends up nosediving into the ground. The way Cronin frames the plane crash in the distant background, intruding as an unsuspecting bystander fixes his bicycle, looks great, and cleverly avoids pouring over details.
Back to Katie who is in a near catatonic state, save for occasional violent outbursts. Her decayed form, covered in bandages imprinted with ancient texts, doesn’t inspire enough questions from the Egyptian authorities. They promptly and improbably return Katie back to her family, who are now living in Albuquerque, hoping the comforts of home will help her heal.
Natalie Grace as Katie in Blumhouse’s “Lee Cronin's The Mummy."Patrick Redmond/Supplied
Cronin finds appealing ways early on to introduce the family dynamics. Raynor alongside Laia Costa as his wife Larissa, Veronica Falcón as her mother and the precocious bickering kids, have a playful rapport that feels lived-in and familiar. And Cronin lends them a personal touch, like when grandma pops out her dentures to amuse the children, which effectively turns into a nightmarish gag later.
The filmmaking also moves through the story with a witty savagery, like when a mummy, banging against a tomb, cuts to a father tapping on a coffee table to get his daughter’s attention; or how the early police investigation into Katie’s kidnapping is interrupted by a “Breaking News” report. You’d assume the news is going to be about Katie. It turns out to be a weather update years later, an amusingly vicious way to collapse time, and all the grief contained within it.
Unfortunately, that grief is largely left unexplored when Katie, as a living and breathing corpse, is returned to her family and the movie tends to more ghoulish business. What’s missing between every moment that has us clawing at arm rests – like a pedicure scene that goes hideously wrong – are emotional stakes.
Parents seeking comfort in death to stay close to a lost child, as in Don’t Look Now, or being emotionally exhausted providing care in impossible circumstances, as in The Exorcist, feel like items being checked off in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, not genuinely felt or grappled with.
In a movie that only superficially distinguishes itself, with its title most of all, these are mummified inspirations, preserved in form but not spirit.
Special to The Globe and Mail