Lee Cronin’s “The Mummy,” or “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” as the Blumhouse marketing department so desperately wants audiences to understand it, is a goopy, gory, good time for the most part; a dour, blood-drenched, foul-mouthed possession-style story of a child becoming infected by the insidious spirit of an ancient demon. That’s all well and good. There’s only one problem. That description sounds less like a “mummy” movie and more like an “Evil Dead” sequel and considering Lee Cronin’s previous film, “Evil Dead Rise,” is the fifth film in Sam Raimi’s series of iconic demon-spewing slop fests, it’s easy to sense some brain bleed from project to project that makes this one feel a bit less unique. In fairness, mummy movies have been largely hit and miss throughout history, with the original Karloff masterpiece and the Brendan Fraser adventure romp as the most notable exceptions. A bandaged crypt walker slowly rising from ancient sarcophagi is a fun trope, if an admittedly dusty one that Cronin is clearly eager to sidestep with his offering, which treats the resurrection of the titular mummified child as less someone cursed by ancient evil than a vessel for one. It’s a fresh approach, there’s no denying, but by supplanting the bones of one long-dead genre with another, what results is an identity crisis of a movie at war with itself, a boilerplate horror flick haphazardly bound in a long rotted shroud in an attempt to be passed off as something new and novel.
“The Mummy” begins with the reveal of a long-held family secret. In the depths of the Egyptian desert, a woman and her family are hiding an ancient evil beneath their home, a mummified corpse in a thousand-year-old sarcophagus that just so happens to be awakening from its unholy slumber to bloody effect. We soon meet a well-meaning American family living in Cairo: Charlie (Jack Reynor), a TV journalist covering the story of water reserves in the desert, and his pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), along with their two children. One day, when Charlie is busy on a work call, their daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is snatched from their garden and rushed away by a cloaked figure into the waiting embrace of an impending sand storm. Despite Charlie and Larissa’s best efforts, and the recruitment of a local detective (May Calamity), there is no trace of Katie; it’s as if she was never there at all. Eight years later, the family has done their best to heal with middling results, living with Larissa’s mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcón), in New Mexico. While they’ve done their best to raise a family, there’s still a Katie-sized hole in their lives. Their fledgling peace is soon upended, however, when a plane is discovered crashed in the Egyptian desert; with a sarcophagus found in the wreckage, THAT sarcophagus, which, when opened, reveals the secret of Katie’s whereabouts. She’s been here, locked in this monolithic black box, her nails growing to obscene lengths, her face pale as death, and her body swaddled in bits of cloth with arcane languages scrawled across them. While borderline comatose, the family is advised to bring Katie (now Natalie Grace) home in an effort to rehabilitate her mental state. Sure, she has violent outbursts and her skin peels from her flesh like long, rotted wallpaper, but what’s the worst that could happen? As it turns out, quite a bit, as what lurks within Katie is older than time itself, a demonic entity long imprisoned within the murky confines of that sarcophagus, now freed to unleash its malevolence on them all.
Mummy movies are admittedly tricky to get right, and even more so when attempting to thread the needle of not running roughshod through an entire culture’s history. For all the enjoyment Western Audiences get from ancient curses and “books of the dead,” American movies play pretty fast and loose with what the long and storied legends and beliefs of ancient Egypt, presenting them with a remove that feels less reverential than it does orientalist. To that end, it’s commendable that Cronin attempts to reimagine what “a mummy” could be for a modern audience; even if that reinvention also frames an Egyptian family that has safeguarded their culture from an evil entity for millennia as child-snatching cultists. There’s an implication that cannot be overlooked when showing a young white girl being trafficked by a group of native, tattooed Egyptians who believe that it is their duty to infect her with the ritual-bound soul of a demon; an othering that, while assuredly not intended, still reeks of a passive xenophobia that goes down the gullet quite poorly. This is the kind of creaky representation that a regular demon possession movie can easily brush aside, as there is no real history to besmirch when deadites or Pazuzu are let loose on an unsuspecting family. Yet by making the film a “mummy” movie that is still based around an American family infected by this scourge from the Middle East, the filmmakers are treading dangerously close to a cultural stereotype that, within the framework of the right story, might be used to flip those tropes on their head; casting the true evil as the supernatural bile being forced upon otherwise good people trying their best forestall destruction. But the film, made as a way for Cronin to come to terms with the recent death of his mother, has less to say about the culture that birthed the titular mummy than one might hope, leading to a story that, while clearly deeply felt, lacks any insight worth excavating beyond some well-staged, and quite disgusting, demonic horror sequences.
Speaking of well-staged horror sequences, the back thirty minutes of “The Mummy” make good on the promise of gross-out that Cronin honed with his “Evil Dead” entry. While the first half of the film languishes in the humorless grieving of a family who barely recognize their newly returned daughter, and who also pose fewer questions about the clearly “mummified” nature of her finding than you would imagine, once little Katie hits full-on wall-crawling mode, the movie kicks into a higher, if familiar gear. I cannot overstate how easily you could rename this movie “The Possession of Katie,” and nobody would bat an eye. We have all the tricks: skin peeling, teeth pulling, corpse defilement, viscera chewing, blood spewing, head bashing, and even a climax that largely hinges on someone being able to reach into their own neck and manipulate their vocal cords to speak. When coyotes are munching on intestines and reanimated corpses are regurgitating scorpions, “The Mummy” is cooking with gas; even if its inherent “mummy-ness” is easily brushed aside, a chronic issue the movie cannot ultimately recover from. Yet still, it cannot be overstated how much “Evil Dead” DNA slithers beneath the parchment-thin skin of the story; there’s even an “evil tape” and an ancient book with desecrated depictions of demons. If only Cronin could find his own scare language free from the blueprints laid out by filmmakers past, we may have had something here.
“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” seems to, in its effort to reinvent the rotted remains of a long-dead monster, to have forgotten what makes that monster so immortal. It’s not so much the shroud or the shambling walk as it is the soul of the creature that has lasted, a longing for a love long lost. There is an inherent romance found in the best mummy movies that feels important to preserve, or at least explore. It’s not that “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” isn’t a fine time in the theater; it’s simply that the movie it wants to be is in direct conflict with the movie it is, an incongruity that leaves even the shock sequences that had me cackling in my seat feeling as little more than a mirage of a better film unmade.
Get lost in the desert.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
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