Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
Director: Lee Cronin
Cert: 18
Starring: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Verónica Falcón, May Elghety, Shylo Molina, Billie Roy
Running Time: 2 hrs 14 mins
We have, in recent years, got used to Irish film professionals racking up significant honours, but it is still something to see Lee Cronin, the talented Dubliner behind horrors such as The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise, receiving the rarely granted “possessive credit”. Even Alfred Hitchcock doesn’t get his name in the title on the Internet Movie Database.
Aside from anything else, this does help distinguish the current release from an imminent (ahem) disinterment of the more jocular Mummy franchise featuring Brendan Fraser. Following Leigh Whannell’s excellent The Invisible Man and his somewhat underappreciated Wolf Man, Cronin takes over Blumhouse Productions’ admirable mission to recontextualise classic movie monsters for a new generation. He does so with a relish for the apocalyptically disgusting that is, as that credit confirms, all his own.
Cronin began with a challenge. This shambling bandage-wearer has always been the most puzzling of the great horror antagonists. Ninety-four years ago, in Karl Freund’s The Mummy (still the best film to bear that title), Boris Karloff ditched the dressings after 10 minutes or so. Muhammad Ali was sufficiently unimpressed by the creature to use it as an unkind nickname, highlighting the ungainly shuffle, for his arch-rival George Foreman.
The writer-director’s solution is to turn his film into a possessed-child horror decorated with cunningly pitched flourishes of faux Middle Eastern exoticism.
Don’t worry. There is a mummy here. There are bandages. There is a sarcophagus. Prof Herbert von Boffin (or whatever he’s called) gets to puzzle over ancient cursive text and speculate about unimaginably ancient myths concerning malign beings that require containment within human hosts. But nobody has to fake being unable to evade a creature that moves at the pace of molasses down a gentle slope.
Following an inevitable jump-scare prologue, we run into Jack Reynor and Laia Costa as Charlie and Larissa, a handsome couple living a decent life in initially unthreatening Egypt. Misery arrives in the form of a witchy outsider who, in a shameless nod to Disney’s Snow White, lures their daughter, Katie (Emily Mitchell), away with a shiny red apple.
Some years later, now back in a baking corner of the US, the parents are surprised and delighted to be told that the poor girl (now Natalie Grace) has been found something close to alive. Apparently imprisoned in a confined space all that time, her skin creased and grey, her face weirdly skewed, she oscillates between catatonia and seething fury. Soon, Katie is (literally) walking across the ceiling.
There are endless reminders here of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, and, as in that film, the action makes borderline-dubious use of our unease at decay and disease. David Cronenberg often did the same thing, but not with this degree of carnivalesque bravado.
Those who found Whannell’s Wolf Man a little too muted will have no such complaint with Cronin’s shameless efforts here to test the audience’s capacity for recreational revulsion. Fair enough. That is one of the things horror is for, and Cronin is proving among the era’s master pranksters.
He is assisted by excellent acting right down the dramatis personae. Reynor has heroic genes. Costa worries with majesty. And young Natalie Grace deserves huge praise for connecting with such blistering force through wads of restrictive make-up and prosthetics.
The picture, shot in Ireland and Spain, will prove a blast for those who like their horror propulsive, transgressive and (in a good way) nauseating. Cronin and his team haven’t quite solved the age-old problem of what to do with the Mummy, but they have confirmed that it remains a dilemma worth tackling. The film deserves the pharaoh’s ransom it will undoubtedly make.