‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Review
A potentially repugnant film!
I’VE WRITTEN BEFORE ABOUT my critical hangups regarding children-in-peril films, so I won’t belabor that point here. But I feel the need to link to that piece and state, for the record, that Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a film that is, at heart, not only about cruelty to children but kind of revels in depicting that cruelty. As a result, I must admit to not only not enjoying it, but also finding it vaguely repugnant.
The film opens eight years ago in Egypt, where we see an Egyptian family fall prey to something weird in a sarcophagus buried under their nectarine farm. Cut to an American family living in Cairo, where a strange woman abducts Katie (played as a child by Emily Mitchell) right out from under her dad, Charlie’s (Jack Reynor) nose. When he and his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), bring the case to the Egyptian cops, they aren’t much help, though Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) promises she’ll get to the bottom of it.
She doesn’t, really; Katie eventually falls out of the sky and into her lap. Almost literally: A plane explodes and she’s found inside the creepy sarcophagus we saw before, horribly disfigured, all bent and gnarled. When Charlie and Larissa bring the girl (now played by Natalie Grace) back to their New Mexico home, weird things start happening. Weird, bad, grotesque things.
Just one small “for instance”: As mother Larissa is trimming Katie’s horrifically overgrown toenails, she hits a real tough one. Thick, black, disgusting. She gets a bigger trimmer, something you might pull from a toolbag, and really goes to town . . . only to tear off not only the nail but also a large flap of Katie’s skin, running all the way up her leg. With a wet thwap, blood flies across the room into nearby Grandma Carmen’s (Veronica Falcón) face. This is played for shock laughter, and some in my audience certainly tittered excitedly. Ha ha, look at the mutilation of this teenage girl. Teehee, she’s being flayed alright. This brand of disfigurement simply hits differently—and I would argue from my own experience in the theater, more off-puttingly—when you’re dealing with innocent children rather than adults.
The titular Cronin, who wrote and directed, really revels in this sort of nastiness; this film is, if we’re being generous, languidly paced (the official runtime is over 130 minutes, somehow), and very dedicated to showing this girl—as well as her younger sister and brother—in great distress. This is not new territory for Cronin, as his previous film, Evil Dead Rise, also spent a fair amount of time abusing the children at the heart of its story, but he had the decency to keep things moving in that picture.
Speaking of The Evil Dead, this new mummy movie owes less to Boris Karloff (despite the sarcophagus) than to Sam Raimi. The demon unleashed in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is more an agent of chaos than anything else, infecting others in the family with bad vibes and general wickedness. We even hear a creepy old audiotape of a scientist explaining the monster’s origins. In fact, this isn’t a mummy movie, really: It’s a possession film. If not The Evil Dead, then The Exorcist—it’s certainly closer in pacing to William Friedkin’s masterpiece, and Regan’s (Linda Blair) ordeal is echoed in Katie’s—albeit a version of that film that takes faith less seriously and is thus less interesting.
Look, I know I may just be a stick in the mud here; my audience had a good enough time with Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. They were laughing in all the spots that were meant to be laughed at as shock-horror; they seemed tense enough when Katie was scuttling through the walls of her family home, eating scorpions. But I found the whole thing rather distressing. The last time I felt this way in a theater was during last year’s Bring Her Back, the Philippou Brothers’ follow-up to Talk to Me.
Talk to Me is also a movie where children are in peril; some of them suffer quite horribly. But that film is also, in part, a sort of anti-drug parable. It’s a movie about kids partaking in risky behavior and, eventually, being punished for it. Bring Her Back, on the other hand, was a straightforward parable for child abuse, just a mean-spirited depiction of the destruction of an innocent that had the indecency to pose as a meditation on trauma. That’s the vibe Lee Cronin’s The Mummy brings to the party: mean-spirited destruction of innocence. And I simply don’t vibe with it.