Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Reinvents a Classic Movie Monster in Grim, Gory Style
3000-year-old demons and shocking body horror collide in Lee Cronin’s oppressively grim interpretation of the classic movie monster.
Putting the writer-director’s name in the title of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy may seem like an odd choice for a filmmaker who isn’t a household name. Aside from The Mummy, Irish-born Cronin has only directed two feature films, one of which was an indie (The Hole in the Ground, 2019) and the other a late-period franchise sequel (Evil Dead Rise, 2023). Hardly marquee status stuff, but across those three films Cronin has developed enough gruesome signatures that an adjective — Croninesque, maybe? — may yet be in his future, particularly if he keeps reinventing classic movie monsters in his own style like he does here.
Cronin is particularly fascinated with dangerously unstable family dynamics: Parents who fail to protect their children, children who wish harm upon their parents, siblings torturing each other as well as Mom and Dad. All of this is present in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, whose ancient Egyptian demon (because of course there’s an ancient Egyptian demon) is named The Nazaranian, “The Destroyer of Families.” Combine that with Cronin’s fixation on bodily fluids, and you get moments like a possessed teenager drinking the embalming fluid out of her dead grandmother’s neck as shocked funeral guests look on.
There’s something wrong with Katie.
These scenes are shocking — blasphemous, even, although they don’t desecrate any particular god so much as the idea of safety within the family unit. This instability is introduced early on, as international correspondent Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) and his wife Larissa (Lala Costa), a nurse working for a Doctors Without Borders-style charity, experience every parent’s worst nightmare when their nine-year-old daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is snatched from their leafy backyard in inner-city Cairo one afternoon. The city streets are chaotic, the police response is indifferent, and eventually the Cannons leave Egypt and go back to Larissa’s hometown in Albuquerque, New Mexico to mourn.
From there, we fast-forward eight years, to a scene that’s more like the action-adventure Mummy movies from the early ‘00s than anything else in this grisly film. We watch a biplane crash into an oasis outside the city of Aswan, ejecting a sleek black sarcophagus that’s like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey reimagined as a morbid art object. Inside, investigators find what appears to be the desiccated corpse of a teenage girl — until she starts screaming, and they realize that it isn’t a corpse at all. It’s Katie (Natalie Grace), who’s soon identified and shipped back to Albuquerque to recover at home. Cue the black vomit and sinister chattering.
On the plus side, the change of desert locations actually does help minimize the Orientalism that’s baked into any Mummy movie from a Western director, particularly one about a Caucasian girl being subjected to 3000-year-old occult rites. At the same time, however, taking Lee Cronin’s The Mummy out of Egypt also highlights how generic some of the movie’s thrills are. Grace twists and thrashes and bends her back so she appears to float off of her bed, but the commitment doesn’t hit as hard as it should because these scenes can’t help but recall The Exorcist, not to mention its many imitators. The creature effects also owe a debt to Cronin’s work on Evil Dead Rise, raising the question of when a signature becomes a crutch.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy falls back on a few too many familiar exorcism tropes, but its bleak, gruesome imagery sets it apart from the many Exorcist knockoffs.
There’s a lot of skittering and growling, along with scenes where Charlie and Larissa chase Katie around the family’s Spanish-style home in the middle of the night, as her younger siblings Sebastián (Shylo Molina) — who knew Katie before her demonic transformation — and Maud (Billie Roy) — who did not — look on in horror. Combined with the downbeat tone and some underwhelming performances in dramatic scenes between Reynor and Costa, the repetition — which extend to the film’s color scheme and cinematography — makes Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feel even longer than its extended 134-minute run time.
That being said, this grim sameness is punctuated with moments of genuine shock. Like last year’s Bring Her Back, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is fascinated with the aesthetics of rot. Here, the corpses are dry and withered rather than bloated and wet. But they’re equally upsetting to look at, particularly the design of Katie’s post-mummification makeup, which disturbingly evokes the tight, puckered skin of a real burn victim. Cronin also weaponizes common phobias around teeth, fingernails, and skin: One startling moment combines two of these, as Larissa’s attempt to cut her daughter’s thick, gray toenails leads to a degloving injury that produced audible gasps at Inverse’s screening of the film.
In the end, going back to Egypt is what saves Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, as a subplot involving a devoted missing-persons investigator named Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) builds to a revelation that both expands the film’s lore and ties its themes together. It even leaves room for a sequel, although two hours and change of this film’s dour tone and intense body horror will be more than enough for some viewers. In fact, it’s hard to imagine who could possibly be left wanting more here — except for Lee Cronin, of course.
