PR in the Philippines

(SeaPRwire) –   Including the writer-director’s name in the title of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy might come off as a strange call for a filmmaker who hasn’t yet become a household name. Beyond The Mummy, the Irish native Cronin has only helmed two feature films to date: the 2019 independent release The Hole in the Ground, and the 2023 late-entry franchise follow-up Evil Dead Rise. While those credits hardly qualify him for top-bill name recognition, Cronin has cultivated enough distinct gory stylistic flourishes across those three works that a dedicated descriptive term — Croninesque, perhaps? — could be in his future, especially if he continues reimagining iconic cinematic monsters with his unique voice as he does with this project.

Cronin holds a particular interest in volatile, high-stakes family relationships: guardians who fall short of keeping their kids safe, children who harbor violent wishes against their parents, and siblings who inflict harm on one another as well as their mother and father. Every one of these threads appears in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which features an ancient Egyptian demonic entity (as one would expect from a mummy film) dubbed The Nazaranian, otherwise known as “The Destroyer of Families.” Pair that with Cronin’s well-documented preoccupation with bodily fluids, and you end up with jarring sequences such as a possessed teen sipping embalming fluid directly from her deceased grandmother’s neck while stunned funeral attendees watch in horror.

These sequences are jarring — even sacrilegious, though they don’t insult any specific deity as much as they undermine the core assumption that a family home is a safe space. This sense of instability is established right away, when international reporter Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) and his spouse Larissa (Lala Costa), a nurse employed by a humanitarian medical charity similar to Doctors Without Borders, live through every guardian’s worst fear: their 9-year-old daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted from their tree-lined backyard in downtown Cairo one afternoon. The city’s streets are in disarray, local law enforcement shows little interest in the case, and the Cannon family eventually departs Egypt to return to Larissa’s hometown of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to grieve their loss.

From that point, the story jumps ahead eight years, to a sequence that feels far more aligned with the early 2000s action-adventure Mummy franchise entries than any other part of this grim, gory film. Viewers see a biplane collide with an oasis just outside Aswan, sending a sleek, black sarcophagus flying from the wreckage — the object looks like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey redesigned as a macabre work of art. When investigators open it, they find what looks like the dried, shrivelled corpse of a teen girl, until she lets out a scream, letting them know she is very much alive. It is Katie, now played by Natalie Grace, who is quickly identified and transported back to Albuquerque to recover with her family. That’s when the black vomit and menacing, chittering sounds begin.

On the positive side, shifting between different desert settings does successfully reduce the Orientalist tropes that are inherent to every Mummy film made by a Western filmmaker, especially one centered on a white girl who has been subjected to 3,000-year-old magical rituals. That said, moving much of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy outside of Egypt also draws attention to how unoriginal some of the film’s scares are. Grace contorts, flails, and arches her back to the point that she looks like she is levitating off her bed, but her dedicated performance doesn’t land as strongly as it could, since these sequences inevitably bring The Exorcist to mind, along with its countless copycat films. The monster design also takes clear cues from Cronin’s work on Evil Dead Rise, prompting the question of when a distinct creative signature becomes an overreliance on familiar tricks.

The film is packed with scuttling movements and low, menacing growls, plus sequences where Charlie and Larissa pursue Katie through their Spanish-style family home in the dead of night, while her two younger siblings watch on terrified: Sebastián (Shylo Molina), who was old enough to remember Katie before her demonic change, and Maud (Billie Roy), who never got to meet her before her abduction. Pair that with the consistently somber tone and some unconvincing acting in the heavy dramatic scenes shared by Reynor and Costa, and the repetitive elements — which even extend to the film’s color palette and camerawork — make Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feel far longer than its already lengthy 134-minute runtime.

Even so, this bleak, repetitive formula is broken up by moments of truly shocking, visceral horror. Similar to last year’s release Bring Her Back, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy leans heavily into the visual language of decay. For this film, the dead bodies are desiccated and shrivelled instead of swollen and damp. They are no less unsettling to look at, though, especially Katie’s post-mummification makeup design, which uncomfortably calls to mind the taut, contracted skin of an actual burn survivor. Cronin also plays on widespread phobias related to teeth, nails, and skin: one jaw-dropping scene blends two of these fears, when Larissa tries to trim her daughter’s thick, discolored gray toenails only to cause a degloving injury that prompted audible gasps from the audience at Inverse’s preview screening of the film.

Ultimately, a return to Egyptian settings is what rescues Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, as a side plot following dedicated missing persons detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) builds to a major reveal that both broadens the film’s fictional world and neatly ties all its narrative themes together. The ending also leaves the door open for a follow-up, though the over two hours of gloomy atmosphere and extreme body horror featured in this entry will be more than enough for many audience members. It’s difficult to picture many viewers leaving the theater craving more of this particular story, that is — except for Lee Cronin himself, naturally.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy premieres in theaters nationwide on April 17.