Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – Movie Review
More in the vein of Leigh Whannell’s recent, darker takes on the iconic Universal Monsters (The Invisible Man and Wolf Man), and definitely not in any way, shape, or form connected to the beloved Brendan Fraser universe (and Blumhouse’s marketing team absolutely want audiences to know this), filmmaker Lee Cronin brings his wicked, nasty, and toe-curling sentiment from his previous effort, Evil Dead Rise, to his latest horror feature, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (obviously named as such to further disassociate from Fraser’s franchise).
Living in Egypt as a television correspondent, Charlie’s (Jack Reynor), along with his wife Larissa (Laia Costa), world is rocked when their youngest daughter, Katie, goes missing without a trace. After eight years, and moving back to America, by some miracle, is found – but not necessarily in a way anyone expected. Katie is found mummified in a sarcophagus amongst the wreckage of a crashed plane still alive. However, once Katie is reunited with her family, what should be a joyous event turns into a living nightmare of demonic proportions.
No stranger to really getting under the audience’s skin with some effective and cringe-inducing body horror, Lee Cronin takes full advantage of that here in his version of The Mummy. Skin peeling, teeth chattering, bile retching, toe-nail trimming, hook impaling – it’s truly astounding how inventive Cronin can get with his horror violence, but how he also interestingly weaves certain violent moments into bigger parts of the narrative. It does feel like Cronin set a standard for himself, and in some ways the genre, with the level of nastiness he went to with Evil Dead Rise, and while The Mummy doesn’t necessarily reach that same level, what he does achieve here is effectively toe-curling.
But, the violence in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feels in service to the bigger picture, and that is something that is tonally quite different from his previous film. Here, he swaps the punk-rock vibes of Evil Dead Rise for a more patient, somber film that deals with a family navigating their grief, and then the complex emotions that arise when that grief is somewhat overturned. The story isn’t the most overly emotionally impactful exploration of these themes, but Cronin plays into them in a way that utilises the strengths of his style, which is one of the film’s overwhelming strengths.
This film looks and feels epic, from the incredible production design (especially the Cannon family home and the farm of which the evil spirit lays dormant), to the gothic mood lighting, and the eerily impactful sound design. On every technical level, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is truly awesome. And Cronin wears a lot of influence on his sleeve, especially the dynamic and abrasive visuals (and violence) of Sam Raimi, with lots of off-putting close ups of eyes and mouths that are sometimes more unsettling than the actual blood and gore.
The cast are also quite good, with Reynor and Costa bringing a lot of humanity to the grieving parents they play. But, it’s Natalie Grace, who in her debut film, gives a hell of a demonic performance, aided by some truly unsettling prosthetic work that lends to the nasty nature of the film overall.
Where Lee Cronin’s The Mummy falters the most is the elongated runtime, which at 133 minutes, is far too long for the story it’s telling. The movie branches off multiple times to an investigative side plot in Egypt involving a detective (May Calamawy) who is working to find the source of Katie’s demonic possession. The reason this side plot drags the movie down (even though it’s not actually a badly written element) is that Charlie is also doing investigations into the ancient Egyptian spirituality of the possession, ultimately giving the movie two of the exact same story arcs happening simultaneously, whilst intermittently taking time to then shock and scare the audience with its effective horror (which as previously stated, is good, but doesn’t reach the potential it could have based on Cronin’s work prior). The investigative story doesn’t add anything original or unique to the genre, which has seen this trope done before and more interestingly. Ultimately, making this feel more like a generic horror flick more so than a riff on the lore of The Mummy itself.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy ends up being quite a mixed bag in the end. When the eerie horror and technical marvel are front and centre, the film is great. But, it is unfortunately bogged down by a slow paced, generic possession movie plot that has been done before, and done better.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is in Australian cinemas April 16
