It takes some confidence to claim an authorial credit in the very title of only your third feature — even Lee Daniels waited until his fourth — but Lee Cronin has never wanted for that. In his A24-backed debut “The Hole in the Ground,” the Irish director upcycled hoary haunted-house clichés with enough brio to land the keys to the “Evil Dead” franchise in his very next outing, and 2023’s riotous splatterfest “Evil Dead Rise” more than justified his swagger. Now, in “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy,” the Irishman shoots for outright brand-name status with a sprawling, semi-original reworking of the perennially exhumed horror franchise that last roped Tom Cruise into an especially musty iteration of its cod-Egyptian lore. Brashly violent, clattery and pleasingly untied to any direct predecessor, the result is more generic than its braggy auteur claims might promise, but there’s a lot here for gorehounds to feast on.
Emphasis on a lot. While “Evil Dead Rise” clocked in at a bracingly short, sharp 96 minutes, “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” sees the director succumbing to the more bloated template of much current multiplex fare. With no earthly (or unearthly) reason to extend even to the two-hour mark, the film blusters past it to a whopping 133 minutes, enough time for it to run through an impressively nasty bag of tricks several times over. If the result is too bloodily action-packed to be boring, the pile-up of mostly expected revelations from the crypt and closely spaced jump scares (call them trampoline scares at their most consecutive) is finally quite exhausting. For better or worse, the film could well sprout its own spidery franchise legs.
The outsize form of “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” is all the more surprising since, in line with Cronin’s previous two features, it’s refreshingly straightforward in design and intent. He remains a top-notch genre craftsman with little interest in so-called “elevated” horror styling or subtext: This isn’t a film about trauma, or smuggled-in social issues, or anything at all, really, besides the honest workaday business of scaring the bejesus out of its audience, rinsing, and repeating with extra vigor. You take nothing away from it but a slightly jumbled stomach and a faint ringing in your ears from Peter Albrechtsen’s artfully relentless sound design: Censor certificates might warn you of the extravagant flesh-shredding and child peril, but not of an aural assault akin to sharing an elevator with a running angle-grinder.
What restraint the film has is mostly to be found in an elegant prologue that ramps up to the first of many resourcefully horrible kills, opening in the recent past on a wholesome Egyptian family taking a rural car trip. While everyone else partakes in a cheery singalong, Mom (an immediately unnerving Hayat Kamille) is not in the mood; back at home, a brutalized pet canary is one clue as to why. Cue a cryptic glimpse at the ominous basalt pyramid hidden on their farmstead, before the focus shifts to another household: Cairo-based American journalist Charlie (Jack Reynor), his pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and their pre-teen children Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams), who are planning a move back to the U.S. soon.
Not soon enough, it turns out. Unbeknownst to her parents, the sweetly ingenuous Katie has made friends with the generously candy-dispensing family next door, and is abducted one afternoon in the midst of a sweeping windstorm — a standout setpiece, awash in roiled dust and rising panic. Though young missing-persons detective Dalia (May Calamawy) is earnest in her attempts to help, her superiors cast suspicion on Katie’s parents; eight years later, the girl is still missing, while the family has relocated to New Mexico. Back in Egypt, however, a freak plane crash uncovers a mysterious tomb that authorities open to find Katie: deformed, malnourished and ghostly-pale, but still miraculously alive.
Or not, as the case may be. Now played — in a performance of admirable physical exertion — by newcomer Natalie Grace, the rediscovered Katie needs a whole lot more than nursing and therapy once reinstalled in the family home, and by the time she’s performing acrobatics on the bed to make Regan MacNeil’s head spin, it’s clear that something closer to Egypto-exorcism is in order. There are no great surprises from here on out, though the sheer, lusty grossness of the fallout is occasionally startling. Eyeballs are unhoused, teeth are transplanted, a body crashes into a windshield before being mauled by wolves for good measure. In a mystical realm where certain folk never fully die, we can afford to try on a few styles of killing for size.
Cronin has a fine, lurid sense of humor, and sure enough, “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” frequently trades in the kind of carnage that inspires as much shrieking hilarity as terror in an amped-up crowd. Gradually stripped of their composure and, in some cases, their skin, the actors all play it with straight-faced commitment — fully aware that they’re ultimately playing second fiddle to dazzling/harrowing prosthetic effects and the bilious pall cast on proceedings by Dave Garbett’s low-lit, mustard-filtered cinematography, not to mention the combined demonic cacophony of the aforementioned sound design and Stephen McKeon’s score. The film rattles enough skeletons, both on screen and in the audience, to ensure that Cronin’s name will be remembered by genre heads with or without the titular reminder. Still, it wouldn’t have had any less visceral impact with a tighter trim. Shave off 40 minutes, as bloodily as you like, and there’d still be enough guts to go round.
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From Variety US