Mummy movies are usually about meddling with something buried in the past and unleashing ancient forces beyond your control. Similar risks can apply to digging up an old movie premise (albeit minus an Egyptian curse). “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” revives one of cinema’s most storied monsters with a suitably macabre makeover, but it spins out in the attempt.
You can’t blame Cronin for trying, since his previous feature, “Evil Dead Rise,” successfully riffed off a Sam Raimi lineage of ill-advised demon summoning and gleefully grotesque staging to create a perpetual-motion house of horrors. Taking the mummy for a whirl on the dance floor for new crowds must have appealed to Cronin and his team (and apparently also appealed to Universal, which announced plans to return to its own “Mummy” series that it revived in 1999).
“Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” centers on an American couple living in Egypt whose young daughter, Katie, goes missing and returns to them, eight years later, definitely the worse for wear. The parents, Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa), welcome her to their homestead in Albuquerque with their son, Katie’s younger sister, and the children’s grandmother (Veronica Falcón). Katie (played by Natalie Grace on her return) looks as if she’s been stuck in a sarcophagus, which is exactly where she was discovered in the wreckage of a plane.
Katie arrives in a near-catatonic state, ashen and scarred. But she is soon scampering through crawl spaces at night, spewing foul effluvia, hovering, and cursing and mauling her nearest and once-dearest. Her condition results from a ritual meant to manage an evil spirit across generations (or, less charitably, pass the buck), as the lengthy film’s explanations draw out. Mostly this “Mummy” feels like an elaborate entry in demonic possession horror that gets out of the house a bit, with the help of a dogged Egyptian detective (May Calamawy, finding her own steady rhythms).
Cronin thrills as ever to luscious gross-out scenes, like a mummy pedicure gone spectacularly awry, some absurd tracheal mayhem, or just a baleful patch of slime under a rug. The movie’s practical effects feature the textured work of Arjen Tuiten, giving Katie a withered and weathered look that evokes artist’s renderings of aged missing children. Too bad about the one-liners that make fun sequences feel generic, the weaker family dynamics compared to “Evil Dead Rise,” and the film’s climax, a hash of close camera setups.
It’s tempting to read more into this hapless American family beyond the film’s circus of frights. They are ensnared in a scourge of violence and terror of a sort they might have thought only afflicted other people. Many horror movies, silly or serious, do have families like that, but the drumbeat of dire news these days can lead one to recognize and identify with characters stuck in an impossible situation. Well-designed ghouls aside, that resonance might be the scariest thing about horror right now.
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Rated R for strong disturbing violent content, gore, language and brief drug use. Running time: 2 hours 13 minutes. In theaters.
The post ‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Review: Fresh From the Sarcophagus appeared first on New York Times.
