This gruesome and visceral take on the mummy story has some very fun twists, turns, and gore.
The first thing that threw me off about the movie was its title. I thought “who is Lee Cronin and why does he get his name above the title?” I had never heard of Lee Cronin. He’s only directed three feature films including this one. Turns out it’s basically a marketing ploy to differentiate it from the Universal mummy movies and especially the Brendan Fraser mummy action movies. I’m glad for the name change. This could not be more different from the delightful Fraser classic.
The film follows a family living in Egypt. Their daughter goes missing. Years pass. The family has struggled to move on it’s their lives. They’ve returned to their home in America. Suddenly they get a call. Their daughter has been found. She was found in an ancient sarcophagus wrapped mummy style bandages covered in ominous inscriptions. The family is so relieved that they hardly question her condition or the sarcophagus. They should.
She exhibits strange behaviors and dangerous actions that threaten the whole family. The natural world around them begins to seem more dangerous too as birds swarm and wolves prowl the yard around their isolated house.
This is pretty standard horror stuff, and it works really well for me. I love a slow burn reveal of evil incarnate inside the home. I love the catatonic mummy daughter Katie, played by Natalie Grace. I love her unsettling movements and raspy breaths and verbal communication.
What I loved most were the sections set in Egypt. While the family is in going their slow burn horror there is a detective in Egypt who never gave up on the missing girl and fights to find out what happened. This too is standard plot mechanics but elevated by great actors and a unique setting. The detective is Dalia Zaki played by May Calamawy. She is great in this role as an officer who refuses to allow herself to be swallowed up by cynicism but it’s a hard fight for her as she faces the tough world around her.
The film brings the gore. It revels in showing bodies being twisted and turned in unnatural directions. It loves the gooey sickly texture of skin peeling off. It loves taking you right to the borderline between scared and nauseated. This worked for me. I enjoyed the gore because I like when gore is done well. This movie builds up slowly to the gore. It shows gives us an hour of tension an hour of wondering how bad this could get before showing us exactly how bad it can get.
Not to spoil it but there is a funeral scene in which everything goes crazy in the grossest most horrifying way that made me sick and scared in equal measure. It’s a great symphony of nasty.
What makes it all more horrible is that it’s happening to and by children. The family has two kids aside their mummy daughter and each are tormented in their own ways by their returning sister. However for me the film didn’t step too far over the line and make me reject the film for its treatment of kids. When horror movies go too far and make kids the target it can easily turn a fun horror into a morally reprehensible experience. This one doesn’t at least for me. I can see a lot of people in my life who are now parents rejecting this film out of hand.
What didn’t fully work for me was the ending. They lean into a big cgi finish. And effects don’t pass muster. They needed a few more hours in the computer to cook before getting put into the final film.
The ending also doesn’t work because I don’t think that it fully or evenly pays off the character arcs we’ve seen throughout the film. To reveal more would get onto spoilers. I’ll just say that the ending was uneven for me.
All that said I enjoyed it I would recommend it, but it’s only a B+ not a full throated endorsement.
