Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

There’s gore galore in Lee Cronin’s take on The Mummy, but we wouldn’t expect anything less from horror supremo Blumhouse. If you’re anticipating anything akin to the swoon-worthy Rachel Weisz and Brendan Fraser franchise, you may want to leave your popcorn at the door for this frenzied frightfest.

Jack Reynor and Laia Costa are wonderfully brooding as Charlie and Larissa, who are besieged with guilt when their young daughter, Katie (Natalie Grace), disappears while the family is stationed in Cairo. But eight years later, she returns, having had a mummified makeover.

Cronin fuses body horror with classic Hitchcockian motifs (a soon-to-be-corpse bouncing down the stairs is unmistakably reminiscent of Detective Arbogast’s demise in Psycho). Accordingly, there are multiple moments of physical grotesquerie so effective that even the most seasoned horror aficionados may wince. Also evident are allusions to The Exorcist, with Katie having more than a touch of Regan in her as her body contorts and she levitates above her bed. Such scenes, although graphic and stomach-turning, are all done in good fun, though this may just be the film’s undoing as the horror often regresses into the farcical.

But amid those scenes of teeth and skin being self-extracted and flayed, there’s more to the film than gut-churning jump scares. Peel beneath the surface (or skin, to be more precise) and there’s a meaningful story here. Unlike previous takes on The Mummy, Cronin reinterprets the narrative as one that’s as psychological as it is visceral. The director turns what’s ostensibly a traditional horror flick into a tale of trauma and the potential for recovery that lies therein. Katie’s monstrous transformation and initial attempts to only harm herself, not others, are apparent metaphors for a survivor’s trauma response.

Likewise, in contrast to the Mummy franchise, Egyptians are part of the narrative as opposed to “Orientalised” and othered. Egyptian-Palestinian actress May Calamawy is a standout as Detective Zaki, who investigates Katie’s disappearance in Cairo. Whereas it invariably takes supposed Western prowess to uncover the mystery in those aforementioned films, Zaki is, ultimately, the hero of the story here.

There’s much to enjoy in Cronin’s reimagining, which starts off as a tensely paced meditation on grief before reaching a gruesome crescendo. With blood, guts, pus and flaying, no organ or secretion is spared from this bold evisceration of a previously PG franchise.