“What if your missing daughter was turned into the Sloth Sin from Se7en?” is a horrifying logline
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is one of the most viscerally upsetting horror films I’ve ever seen. It is genuinely insane to me that Warner Bros not only distributed this, but did it as a wide release spring tent pole. Many, many people are going to walk out of this, furious at the cruelty or sick to their stomachs. I could not have loved it more.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (and yes, it is very much Lee Cronin’s; his name even shows up in the title card here) starts off deeply mean, and then never lets off the accelerator. We follow the Cannon family, first in Egypt during the abduction of their young daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell), and then 8 years later, as the family tries to move on from the disappearance; Charlie (Jack Reynor) a former promising young reporter, has become a shell of himself, and his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) has retreated the family back to her mothers home, hoping to find solace in the hills of New Mexico.
But, one day, they receive a call; not only have they found Katie, but she is alive. What they don’t expect, though, is the state she is in. Katie (Natalie Grace) is a twisted, broken shell of a person, lost in a haze of ferality and insanity. She went through hell, and no one in the Cannon family could have known what hell she’d be bringing with her.
The levels of pure, pitch black cruelty and gleeful mean spiritedness on display here is honestly a bit awe inducing. Cronin has magnified a trait of his previous film, Evil Dead Rises, that I had actually seen as a bit of a negative; Evil Dead Rises, for me, felt like a film that didn’t fully comprehend the scope of the bleakness that its central story presented (what if loving family literally ripped each other apart?), instead focusing on the gore gags and jump scares.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, though? Cronin fully understands the intense, sadistic cruelty on screen, and absolutely rubs your nose in it. We not only watch this family deal with hardships; we watch those hardships slowly tear them apart, never being given an inch of sympathy. This family, who so desperately just want their lives back, are put through the trials of dealing with the lose and then discovery of a horrifyingly abused child, the hardships of caring for a deeply disabled child, and trying to stop the demon within said child who is actively working on maiming and killing your remaining children.
A lot of what makes that all work (work = make you deeply uncomfortable) is Natalie Grace’s performance, whose Katie oscillates between a literal desiccated corpse and a feral animal. No matter how much the family tries to squeeze an inch of humanity out of her, she is just either a blank, rotting slate or a vicious whirlwind of violence.
Not that the rest of the family don’t get into the brutality; every one of the kids get their own gut wrenching sequence of self inflicted bodily harm. The worst, and I do mean worst, is the youngest daughter, Maud (Billie Roy), whose child-like obsession with playing with her loose teeth is taken to the most gut churning extreme when she finds herself under the influence of the evil within the house.
That is all to say that what really helps sell all the nastiness is the gore on display here. Cronin was clearly just warming up with Evil Dead Rise, because the blood and guts on display here are just so much more intense and gut churning; the amount of skin flaying and tonguing of open wounds is a bit shocking. There is one gore gag misdirect here that, for the first time in maybe a decade, had me do a vocal recoil of disgust. Be ready to feel a bit queasy.
I wish I could say that this thing fires on all cylinders all the way through, but there is some genuine sag in the second act. The film attempts to juggle 3 different plots at one point; Charlie investigating what happened to his daughter, Larissa trying to take care of Katie, and an Egyptian Detective, Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), who’s trying to hunt down the abductors. The film ends up having a bit of a “too many cooks” situation, as more and more characters are introduced to explain more and more backstory, and by the time we roll into the 3rd act, you can feel the film just trying to shake off all its extra weight from the B and C plots. Doesn’t help that there is a bit of a weird tagged-on epilogue here that feels like the film bending over backwards to have a “happy ending”.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy also suffers from a bit of a performance issue; Jack Reynor. He’s just not doing great work here. He’s supposed to be the rock of the family, who’s also attempting to keep it all together, but there is just no nuance to Reynor’s performance at all. Rather than trying to show the different shades of grief and dismay he is going through while remaining resilient, he’s pretty much doing the Shocked Pikachu face throughout.
But, to be honest, these are small quibbles for what is a truly visceral, shocking horror movie. This is very much not a horror movie for everyone; it is mean in a way that can feel oppressive and a bit antagonistic, seemingly hating both its characters and the audience. But, if you’re anything like me, and you feel a level of cathartic release being beaten over the head with such vicious cruelty and apathy, and you end up reveling in how dark the director is willing to go, this non-stop trip down “your kid’s messed up and there’s nothing you can do about it” avenue, in bummersville, USA, is just the ticket for you.
