Not content with tearing one family apart in Evil Dead Rise, director Lee Cronin returns to torment another with his take on a classic movie monster. Forget Brendan Fraser and Boris Karloff – this ain’t your mother’s Mummy. In its tale of a tight-knit family unit ripped to pieces by the disappearance and sudden return of their beloved daughter, Cronin goes hard. Harder, even, than his previous film. Which is no mean feat – we’re still cringing at the memory of what he put the characters of Evil Dead Rise through.
Thrown into a fresh cycle of trauma is the Cannon family, led by TV journalist Charlie (Midsommar star Jack Reynor) and pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa). They’re living in Cairo when their young daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is suddenly kidnapped by a creeper at the bottom of the garden. Eight years later, and now residing in New Mexico, Charlie and Larissa are shocked when Katie is found. With her now catatonic after spending the best part of a decade locked inside a sarcophagus, it quickly becomes clear that this isn’t the same Katie they lost. Quite literally, in fact, as she’s now played by Natalie Grace in a performance that’s part Hereditary, part The Exorcism.
And what happened to Katie? As the family try to reintegrate the teenager into the home, Charlie puts his skills as a journalist to good use in unlocking the mystery of her disappearance. What he soon comes to learn is that… well, maybe Katie should have stayed buried.
Where the efficiently horrible Evil Dead Rise barely pushed ninety minutes, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy takes its time to breathe… a rank, fetid breath that reeks of death and embalming fluid. Written by the director in the wake of real-life tragedy, it holds nothing back in its depiction of grief and its devastating effects on those of us who survive. It’s sphincter-tightening, sick-in-your-mouth stuff, and includes a sequence which does for toenail clippers what Evil Dead Rise did for the cheese grater. This is made all the more discomforting for its likeable cast (including Billie Roy and Shylo Molina, who play the Cannons’ other children) and the well-written, often heartbreaking family dynamic.
It may come off the rails during the boisterous final act (including an egregiously tacked-on closing scene), but this is the most fun you’ll have with a bad time this year. Provided you don’t go in expecting a traditional Mummy movie from Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, that is. Blending intense body horror with big scares and even bigger laughs, the director more than earns his name being in the title. His bloody fingerprints are all over the thing – a crowd-pleasing, stomach-upsetting work of sustained horror that’s more Evil Dead than his actual Evil Dead film.
LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY is out in UK cinemas now.
