The Mummy review – classic monster gets dug up for unravelling resurrection

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Warner Bros would prefer that you referred to their new hard R take on The Mummy as Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, a bafflingly grandiose insistence that has earned some deserved ridicule online over the past few weeks. It’s partly to separate it from Universal’s upcoming return to the 90s-00s franchise (Blumhouse, the horror hit-makers behind the film, on X posted: “BRENDAN FRASER IS NOT IN LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY” last week) as well as what those films represented – safe, family-friendly and easily theme park-able. It’s also an attempt to capitalise on our pop auteur moment, one that Warners has helped to create with Ryan Coogler and Zach Cregger both front and centre of the campaigns for their hit genre films last year (The Mummy’s trailer notably heralds it as “from the studio who brought you Weapons” as if that were to mean all that much).

While it is refreshing to see a studio focus on pushing a director over an actor (the last attempt at a Mummy movie relied on the star power of Tom Cruise, a decision that couldn’t stop the film from losing a considerable amount of money), it also speaks to an unearned indulgence and an expedited crowning of a genius before one has really had the chance to prove oneself (a lose-lose of-the-moment trend we need to move away from and one that, to his credit, Cronin was unsure about being a part of). Cronin, an Irish film-maker who has made just two films to date (The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise), is an undeniable visual talent but his Mummy is also absurdly, watch-checkingly overlong (134 minutes is an unacceptable length for a genre film as thin as this), tonally unsure and, fatally, not all that scary. It’s also, for something so clearly attributed to just one person, a film so deeply influenced by the work of many, many others. It might not feel like a Mummy movie you’ve seen before but it’ll feel like a great deal else.

After Tom Cruise’s The Mummy tanked the doomed Dark Universe, Universal has tried to find smaller, smarter and, crucially, cheaper ways to use their classic monsters. Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man became a Sleeping with the Enemy-like domestic thriller, the Nicolas Cage-led Renfield turned a Dracula side character into the lead of a high-concept comedy, Abigail turned a crime thriller into a comedy horror with the kidnapping of Dracula’s daughter and then Wolf Man went lean on one location with its misfiring commentary on toxic masculinity. Cronin’s Mummy is a far grander – and one would imagine more expensive – proposition but it’s a similar attempt to avoid the obvious. It’s a familiar creepy kid horror in the vein of The Exorcist, The Omen, Orphan or Cronin’s debut, The Hole in the Ground, but wrapped up a little differently …

The creepy kid is Katie, who after going missing in Cairo eight years prior, is found in the wreckage of a plane crash, kept inside an ornate sarcophagus, a suspected victim of human trafficking. Her expat parents (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa, trying their best with scraps), who have since moved to New Mexico with their two young children, bring her home but they’re warned that she is suffering from locked-in syndrome and it’ll take time to draw her out. Yet for all of the creepiness involved with Katie’s disappearance, taken by a malevolent local woman who uses her daughter to “groom” her with candy, her return is ruined by some rather rubbery prosthetics, as if a garden lawn Halloween figure suddenly came to life (her parents questioning whether she might be OK becomes an increasingly laughable bit). As her teeth start to crunch and her skin starts to tear off, one starts to wonder if Cronin has made an unofficial Evil Dead follow-up, especially as he throws every ounce of flesh at the wall in an exhaustingly loud, all-in finale.

But he doesn’t possesses Sam Raimi’s wicked sense of humour, the film taken just a little bit too seriously (the extended length also allows for a serious, from-another-movie detective investigation back in Egypt, convincingly led by May Calamawy) so when moments of last act goofiness do come (as the two daughters ape the filthy mouth of Linda Blair’s Regan and a funeral descends into a full-blown splatter movie) they feel like strangely discordant blips. So much of the film is built around a question posed by the tagline – what happened to Katie? – but the answer is quite literally just the title (she became Lee Cronin’s The Mummy) and so any hope that such length and such grandness will lead somewhere surprising or substantive is soon dashed. Like in Evil Dead Rise, Cronin ultimately seems most interested in the gloopy gore of it all, of which there is plenty, but again it’s mostly a little too outlandishly unreal to really pierce through (although he gets credit for an inventive use of a scorpion and some torn vocal cords). There’s less interest in character or suspense or logic and so much of the unfolding chaos takes place in a world where rational questions – wouldn’t someone hear that, wouldn’t they have asked that, why would they do that – are conveniently ignored.

I do appreciate Cronin’s bold, Imax-sized ambition, his Mummy feeling and sounding far more epic than the standard Blumhouse horror, a hark back to a time when studios would treat monster movies like high-craft blockbusters and his film is often quite stunning to look at. But the feel of a real movie isn’t enough to rival the thrill of all the other pieces also falling into place as once again, the one thing a horror director has been unable to conjure is a terrifyingly good script.