Lee Cronin’s The Mummy <\/p>\n
\ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d9 \ue9d7 <\/p>\n
Director: Lee Cronin<\/p>\n
Cert: 18<\/p>\n
Starring: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace, Ver\u00f3nica Falc\u00f3n, May Elghety, Shylo Molina, Billie Roy<\/p>\n
Running Time: 2 hrs 14 mins<\/p>\n
We have, in recent years, got used to Irish film professionals racking up significant honours, but it is still something to see Lee Cronin<\/a>, the talented Dubliner behind horrors such as The Hole in the Ground<\/a> and Evil Dead Rise<\/a>, receiving the rarely granted \u201cpossessive credit\u201d. Even Alfred Hitchcock doesn\u2019t get his name in the title on the Internet Movie Database.<\/p>\n [\u00a0Brendan Fraser: \u2018My great-grandad escaped the Famine. He came across the Atlantic by himself aged 11\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. Following Leigh Whannell\u2019s excellent The Invisible Man<\/a> and his somewhat underappreciated Wolf Man<\/a>, Cronin takes over Blumhouse Productions\u2019 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.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s The Mummy (still the best film to bear that title), Boris Karloff<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n The writer-director\u2019s solution is to turn his film into a possessed-child horror decorated with cunningly pitched flourishes of faux Middle Eastern exoticism. <\/p>\n Don\u2019t worry. There is a mummy here. There are bandages. There is a sarcophagus. Prof Herbert von Boffin (or whatever he\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Following an inevitable jump-scare prologue, we run into Jack Reynor<\/a> and Laia Costa<\/a> 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\u2019s Snow White, lures their daughter, Katie (Emily Mitchell), away with a shiny red apple. <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n