Lee Cronin‘s The Mummy opens in Aswan, Egypt. A family checks the sarcophagus they are tasked with containing beneath their house after seeing signs that the creature within it has awakened.
It is awake, and it now demands a fresh body.
So the family’s matriarch (Hayat Kamille) travels to Cairo and secretly meets Katie (Emily Mitchell), the eldest daughter of journalist Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor). After slipping a cursed nectarine to the unsuspecting child, she abducts her.
Katie is not seen again.
8 years passed. While Charlie, his wife Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two children Sebastian (Shylo Molina) and Maud (Billie Roy) are getting food, they receive a call from the Embassy informing them that Katie (Natalie Grace) has been found, alive, inside a sarcophagus. They rush to meet her at a hospital. She is breathing but catatonic, making only faint gasping noises.
The Cannons bring her home and try to care for her. But something is very wrong. Katie begins exhibiting strange and harmful behaviors, and they soon discover bindings covered in ancient scriptures on her body.
Unconvinced that any of this is merely a medical condition, Charlie enlists the help of Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) to uncover the truth about his daughter.
Unlike its monster peers, mummies are not as successful in mainstream media as zombies, werewolves, and vampires. In my many years of watching movies, I cannot recall a good mummy movie. It’s like they’re cursed. They can’t seem to unwrap themselves from the bandages of mediocrity; every attempt to breathe new life into the genre just ends up being buried in time, forgotten forever.
So, I had high hopes for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, hoping we might finally get a good one. I know Cronin from Evil Dead Rise, and that film’s unhinged energy and fun carnage combined into something that checks all the boxes for what a good horror movie should be. I expected the same here: no-holds-barred dread and a gore fest. I was ready to squirm in my seat and cover my eyes at the nasty stuff I was about to witness.
But after all that anticipation, I sadly ended up bored. Unfortunately.
It strikes me that this film is too safe for a horror movie. Where did the unhinged energy and fun carnage go? It just replicates other horror movies and relies heavily on familiar tropes. It is far from the film I hoped would finally make me afraid of mummies.
It is even more disappointing given that all the ingredients are there: a deadly curse, a creepy old house, a cult, an unassuming family, a child possessed by some evil spirit. Yet it becomes so fixated on the wrong things, namely the police investigation and the body horror, that it fails to use these other effective ingredients for maximum effect.
In all fairness, the body horror is gory and icky. It will make your skin crawl with disgust. But disgusting is not scary. And when the film becomes so insistent on making us feel grossed out about what is happening, it becomes an endurance test rather than a horror movie.
Besides the lack of scares, the characters (especially the parents) are terribly written. They feel like the most generic, paint-by-numbers characters you will ever see in a movie, making choices that serve plot convenience rather than emotional logic.
One is a tunnel-visioned researcher. Good. But he is not communicating his findings to his partner and is ignoring everything else happening around him. The other is an emotion-driven denier who believes her child just needs care and affection. Never mind that she is literally wrapped in someone else’s skin and talks like a demon; she just probably needs some love. These two perspectives should create genuine tension, leaving us wrestling with the idea that they can both be right and wrong. But both positions are written so broadly that neither evolves into a compelling argument. In the end, these character traits exist only to delay the inevitable, which is the worst reason to write a character.
I also get that by ignoring the telltale signs that this is not their child anymore, they can push the narrative of familial love, sacrifice, and selflessness. But keeping it going and letting it hurt their other children, isn’t that just bad parenting dressed up as love?
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy promises more than it can deliver. It has everything it needs to succeed, with details rich enough to build upon and explore. But it tries so hard to incorporate family drama when it simply doesn’t need to. It doesn’t need to be elevated horror. For most of its runtime, I just want Cronin to lean into what he does best: visceral, relentless carnage. I think that’s enough to stand out. The bar for “best mummy film ever” is remarkably low, and failing to clear even that makes the disappointment sting all the more.
1.5/5
Now showing in cinemas.