Lee Cronin’s The Mummy – an uninspired, unscary gore fest that demonises disability and leans into stereotypes of Egypt

Production company Blumhouse has taken a gamble by featuring director Lee Cronin in top billing in his third film’s marketing campaign. Announcing Cronin as a horror auteur, the film’s full title is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. This is an odd move for a director with only two (admittedly strong) previous features under his belt. It is perhaps a strategy to differentiate the film from the Brendan Fraser-led adventure series or the abysmal Tom Cruise vehicle from 2017.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy features little that ties it to the long legacy of previous films with the same title. The template for The Mummy was established by Boris Karloff’s looming Imhotep of 1932 and Christopher Lee’s Kharis of 1959, both Ancient Egyptians who return to life after being exhumed by Western archaeologists. Lee Kronin’s The Mummy is less about the plundering of Ancient Egyptian tombs and more about tapping into the elemental fears of parenthood – as Cronin explored to great effect in his previous two films.

Cronin’s first feature was the independent horror film The Hole in the Ground (2019), which was a confident and capable outing. Like several other first-time filmmakers of independent horror film in the 2010s (Mike Flanagan, Corin Hardy, Rose Glass) Cronin was rapidly courted by Hollywood. He was then handed the reins of the most recent instalment of Sam Raimi’s well-loved Evil Dead series. Cronin wrote and directed the savvy, elementally terrifying Evil Dead Rise (2023), which transported that franchise from its familiar cabin-in-the-woods setting to an urban high rise with brilliant results. His third feature isn’t up to par with these, sadly.

In The Mummy’s harrowing opening, every parent’s worst nightmare is realised as nine-year-old Katie is snatched by a stranger who entices her with sweets at the bottom of the family’s garden in Cairo. The action cuts to eight years later and Katie is found alive having been mummified – buried in an Egyptian sarcophagus wrapped in bandages. The returned Katie is erratic, non-verbal and animalistic, needing attentive care.

In the build-up to revelations about what Katie has endured and how she has remained alive, her parents face the challenges of caring for a child with significant physical and behavioural needs. Played differently, this theme could be explored with sensitivity and insight. However, in an early scene that foreshadows the kind of excessive body horror that Cronin is heading towards in the film’s climactic scenes, the parents try to clip Katie’s overgrown toenail, resulting in the gruesome peeling off of her leg’s atrophied skin.

This harrowing scene sets the film’s tone. Cronin is far more interested in pummelling his audience with relentless gore and shallow shock tactics that seriously exploring the story’s themes.

The Mummy revisits familiar tropes from horror classics rather than searching for its own identity. Eventually, and far too conventionally, the film’s focus on the creepy possessed child owes far more to the well-worn tactics of The Exorcist(1973). Like The Exorcist’s Regan, Katie’s body contorts and she becomes vicious and foul-mouthed. Modern special effects bring to life her abject bodily fluids vividly. While Cronin drew from The Exorcist enjoyably in Evil Dead Rise, threats to the American family are rehashed less successfully here.

Horror can be a powerful way to explore themes of parental sacrifice and struggle sensitively and meaningfully. Jennifer Kent’s sublime and influential The Babadook (2014) reworked the conventions of uncanny horror to produce an empathetic and moving depiction of a grieving mother caring for a child with psychological needs. Cronin’s breakout The Hole in the Ground was reminiscent of Kent’s film for its depiction of a mother faced with her son’s increasingly erratic and disturbing behaviour. It is difficult to imagine, however, how a horror film in The Mummy’s mode of intense gore and aggressive violence could bear the weight of the topic.

Troublingly, the film derives spectacle from representing disability with unsettling horror. For instance, when Katie’s wheelchair hovers and clatters its wheels menacingly against the ground, it moves uncomfortably towards the criticism of the wider genre for using disability as shorthand for wickedness and immorality.

The characterisation is also disappointingly facile and shallow. Cronin’s script’s attempts to humanise his traumatised family, before the inevitable frenzy of violent set-pieces, fall flat. This is not helped by contrived moments and one-dimensional performances across the board.

Given the notoriety of prior horror films that present Egyptian history and culture as strange and exotic, playing into anxieties around “foreignness”, we should reasonably expect this film to work hard to avoid stereotypes and cliches. But it doesn’t.

The familiar laying on of sandstorms, hieroglyphics, beetles, scorpions and other tired signifiers of Egyptian culture do little to work against a white western gaze. The casting of Egyptian actors may have offset issues with cultural representation. But the main Egyptian actor plays a barely fleshed-out detective (May Calamawy, Marvel TV’s Moon Knight) who is investigating the mystery of Katie’s disappearance. She also adds little beyond tired police movie tropes.

Cronin’s third film continues the kind of punk rock horror aesthetic that the director is becoming known for. But, it is not a showcase for the evident talent that he displayed in his first two films. In the search for fairground-style gasp-out-loud horror moments, The Mummy becomes unhinged and unruly, descending into a formless barrage of gory body horror and careening violence.

The film is overlong at 133 minutes and outstays its welcome. Despite its length, there is surprisingly little suspense and little that is actually scary. Its sharp shocks would have been better delivered within the tighter structure usually expected from a genre film like this, or the running time could be better employed to build tension and character.

Matt Jacobsen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.