‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Review: Careful the Spell You Cast, Children Will Listen (and Sometimes Kill) [C]
Lee Cronin has literally made quite a name for himself. Just seven years since his debut feature The Hole in the Ground premiered at Sundance, he’s reached the rare echelon of filmmakers whose name has been added onto the full and official title of their film. And sure, this may simply be a way to distinguish it from the beloved (and soon-to-be rebooted) franchise starring Brendan Fraser (who, as you may have heard, is not in this movie) and Rachel Weisz. But the title structure of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy also helps to catch the attention of true horror freaks, who will know him best as the filmmaker behind the twisted, unrelentingly nasty Evil Dead Rise. But even if the director’s name hadn’t been slapped onto every piece of marketing, this film would undoubtedly draw comparisons to that legendarily gnarly horror series. The Mummy has a similar unholy energy, unafraid to place any and all of its characters in some of the most brutal situations imaginable. And yet, the film struggles to maintain tension across its unfathomably long runtime, like a mummified corpse wrapped much too loose to effectively keep.
As he did in Evil Dead Rise, Cronin once again goes for what so many modern horror movies have done ever since that little girl’s noggin met a telephone pole in Hereditary: he puts a child character through hell. Here, the titular mummy is Katie (Natalie Grace), a little girl who was kidnapped in Cairo before being found alive eight years later. Somehow, she was placed in an ancient sarcophagus, managing to survive through unknown means. Her dumbstruck (emphasis on dumb, but we’ll get to that) parents, Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa), bring their clearly damaged daughter back home to Albuquerque. Katie is mute and locked into a catatonic, contorted state, making it hard for her brother Sebastián (Shylo Molina) to reconnect with his long-lost sibling. However, Katie’s younger sister Maud (Billie Roy), who was born after the kidnapping, does her best to try to bond with the husk of the sister she never met.
Once Katie is back home in New Mexico, it’s immediately clear that this isn’t a medically-explainable situation. But her family is in deep, deep denial (I promise that isn’t an Egyptian pun), which makes sense at first. After all, these characters don’t have the knowledge that we in the audience do that they’re living in a horror movie. But Katie begins acting in ways that would make even the most skeptical person suspect that something otherworldly is behind her behavior. Her parents steadfastly refuse to see Katie’s actions as anything other than the product of her traumatic situation. Larissa is particularly stubborn about this, partially owing to the fact that she works in medicine. This characterization choice buys the film some time, but her insistence on being able to take care of her daughter, despite the increasing perils that she puts herself and her family through, carries on to a laughable degree.
Horror movies need to have characters with some amount of skepticism in order to remain sustainable for the length of a feature. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy takes that line of thinking and stretches it out past the point of viability. At over two hours, it’s quantifiably longer than most scary movies, which often understandably value brevity in order to keep the audience fearfully engaged. Here, Larissa and Charlie go past the point of plausible deniability to just how messed up Katie is, and eventually, they just seem stupid (alternate title idea: Two Dummies and a Mummy). This isn’t helped by the fact that Cronin constantly cuts to unflatteringly unremarkable reaction shots of one of them immediately after yet another horrifying happening. Reynor keeps making the same vacant, wide-eyed face in these shots, while Costa almost always underplays Larissa’s shock. It would be easy to simply say that the two actors are giving bad performances, but the uniformity and consistency with which they’re presented in this way means that it’s almost certainly a poorly executed directorial choice.
Luckily, the other actors who make up this fictional family turn in much more varied performances. Shylo Molina is appropriately hesitant throughout as a moody teen. Billie Roy is tasked with delivering most of the film’s comic relief, and what could be an annoying character trait is instead reliably hilarious. And Natalie Grace is so disturbingly committed in her physicality that she more than earns the lofty end credit, “Introducing Natalie Grace as Katie.” Verónica Falcón is wonderful as Larissa’s mother Carmen, giving the kinds of shocked responses to Katie’s gruesome deeds that the film is otherwise lacking.
Nobody can accuse Cronin of phoning in the technical side of his filmmaking duties. He loves to use grotesque close-ups, especially of mouths, in order to emphasize horrific moments (although the film’s messy finale excessively uses this framing technique in a way that sacrifices visual clarity). And he uses the split diopter lens so much that even Brian De Palma might object. Most of the time, it’s deployed effectively; Cronin has a particular penchant for putting something horrifying in the foreground, often focusing on just one part of the character serving as the object of terror, while another character is equally in focus and shot in full in the background. This helps to create a sense of immediacy to the horror, placing both the normal and abnormal in one single shot. But the overuse of this technique dampens its general impact (and at least one of these shots has the focus improperly aligned, which is beyond distracting). And the make-up effects used to bring the mummified Katie to unholy life are spectacular. Her skin is believably damaged, one of her eyes droops, and her nails would make a manicurist quit their job.
But no matter how good the prosthetics are, they can’t make up for the film’s severe pacing issues. As is to be expected of a film that so eagerly wants audiences to know that this movie’s visionary made an Evil Dead chapter, the gory moments are shockingly grotesque. This is a spoiler-free review, but let me just give you two words: nail clippers. But whenever something nasty or terrifying occurs, the film has a habit of cutting away before the situation fully resolves. And when we pick back up in the next scene, the characters (especially the parents) barely act differently. It feels as if they’re constantly experiencing a video game death and simply respawning to their last save point. This completely saps the film of tension; it fails to wind its audience into its unnatural world, instead letting them off the hook of suspense over and over again.
The scares may be visually effective, if all too brief, but they’re not supported with particularly inspired writing. The dialogue that the possessed Katie is tasked with delivering is particularly clichéd, and won’t shock anyone who’s seen just a clip of The Exorcist (or even Scary Movie 2). These scripting issues, combined with laughable characterizations and an unearned, excessive runtime just made me wish the film would make like a mummy and wrap it up.
Grade: C
Warner Bros. will release Lee Cronin’s The Mummy only in theaters on April 17.
He currently resides in Chicago and is a proud member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and GALECA: The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. He also writes and podcasts for Next Best Picture and co-hosts his own podcast “Halloweeners: A Horror Movie Podcast.” You can follow him on Twitter, Letterboxd, and Bluesky @codymonster91
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