A Family Under Threat From Within

Irish director Lee Cronin showed a lip-smacking eagerness to exploit parental fears in The Hole in the Ground and Evil Dead Rise. He doubles down on that thematic horror staple in his vigorous reimagining of The Mummy, a bonkers freakout about a family naively convinced that the reassuring comforts of home can fix the violently catatonic daughter lost to them for eight years. At least until all hell breaks loose in a kinetic movie that revels in its unrelenting nastiness. Think The Exorcist meets Hereditary and you’re on the right track.

Does Cronin’s film have the sharp narrative lines or control of those predecessors? Not even close, but it has enough style and scares, breathless energy and even fiendish humor almost to justify the grandiose inclusion of the director’s name in the title. In truth that was a marketing decision to distinguish the film from the Universal Classic Monsters canon as well as the focus on adventure, action and romance in the recent reboots. Besides, a little branding on a rising-star horror auteur is no bad thing, especially one who has been welcomed into the fold of producers James Wan and Jason Blum.

A prologue in Arabic deftly situates a secondary family in the story’s foundations on the outskirts of Cairo. A cheerful dad and his three kids raucously sing along with the car radio when the witchy mother (Hayat Kamille) at the wheel, who later identifies herself as “a magician,” abruptly switches it off and tells them they’re giving her a headache. Her mood sours further when they arrive home to their nectarine farm near an oasis and find the pet canary half-dead in a pool of inky blood. This prompts the parents to check on the ancient basalt sarcophagus in the archeological warren under the house. 

The hold that the artifact has over the family and the duties they must perform to keep its evil spirit quiet are explained much later, long after the magician has sparked up a secret friendship with 8-year-old American Katie Cannon (Emily Mitchell) while she’s playing in a hidden corner of her garden. Katie’s father, Charlie (Jack Reynor), is a TV news correspondent; by the time he steps outside to check on her, Katie is gone. Police, including English-speaking junior detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), come up with nothing.

Cut to eight years later, when the American family — including Katie’s mother Larissa (Laia Costa), her younger brother Sebastian (Shylo Molina) and the sister not even born at the time of the abduction, Maud (Billie Roy) — have left Egypt and returned to Albuquerque to live with Larissa’s Mexican American mother Carmen (Veronica Falcón). 

Even early on, before the gruesomeness starts spiraling out of control, Stephen McKeon’s stabbing, head-scrambling score and Peter Albrechtsen’s gut-churning soundscape work overtime to jangle our nerves. Restraint is not a quality that comes to mind with Cronin.

A plot detour observes a small plane going down in Egypt and a cyclist wandering through the wreckage to find both crew members dead and seriously mangled. (That tree branch through the eye, ouch.) But standing intact is a familiar sarcophagus, which should never have been moved. 

Egyptian authorities contact Charlie and Larissa to inform them that their daughter has been found. Unwrapped from goopy bandages covered in Hieratic script dating back centuries, Katie (played at 16 with diabolical weirdness by Natalie Grace) looks more dead than alive. But her vitals are strong and there’s startling force in her unpredictable convulsions and bone-chilling noises. With gnarled hands and feet, a sickly skin color, a withered face and a wonky eye, she’s the supreme adolescent freak. Her headbutting precision is a concussion hazard.

When the Cannons put their unresponsive daughter in a wheelchair and get her back to New Mexico — a desert-bound setting not unlike the Egyptian farmhouse from the beginning; exterior locations were filmed in Almería, Spain, Once Upon a Time in the West country — she’s quiet for a minute until Grandma makes the mistake of praying over her. (Never hurts to stir a little Catholicism into the mix, but careful with those rosary beads, Abuelita.) Larissa’s attempt at a pedicure goes no better. Maud is curious but cautious about the big sister she’s never met, while Seb keeps a repulsed distance.

There are nods to Linda Blair’s Regan in the sludgy projectile vomit that pours out of Katie, as well as the animalistic scampering, bodily contortions and levitation. She starts getting into the crawl space in the old house’s walls, her thumping movements echoing through the rooms and terrifying the kids. After watching her ingest a live scorpion, Charlie is the first to suggest they might need to move her to someplace better equipped to take care of her. But Larissa, a nurse always at the ready with syringe full of sedatives, is inflexible about Katie remaining at home.

Consultation with an archeology scholar (Mark Mitchinson, giving good Donald Pleasence) reveals the existence of a malignant spirit called the Nazmaranian, a shadow that moved among the living, known as “the destroyer of family” and thought to have been contained long ago. Not that we really needed to put a name to it when Katie is messing with the household’s heads, turning them into demonic accomplices. She also seems to have help from four snarling gray wolves at the gates, hungry for blood and guts. 

Meanwhile, back in Egypt, Det. Zaki comes across some illuminating evidence which she flies to the U.S. to share with the Cannons. That makes one more person to be brutalized after they learn the hard way never to take a mummy to a wake.

Cronin’s threshold for disgusting developments will challenge audiences who are easily shocked, but his skill at whipping up a crescendo of horrors helps distract from a plot with too little connective thread between the big showstoppers. The vicious climax in the house, involving the ultimate parental sacrifice, segues to a coda back in Egypt, where all the threads are satisfyingly tied together.  

The collaboration with DP Dave Garbett that brought rich, grungy textures, frantic movement, uneasy angles and disorienting split diopter shots to Evil Dead Rises pays off with similar visual intensity here. Even if it’s overlong — repeatedly careening over the top and favoring crazed body-horror thrills and unbridled gore over character involvement or storytelling clarity — this is remarkably sustained lurid entertainment that offers a fresh take on the mummy myth.