Lee Cronin's The Mummy makes a name for itself as the gnarliest mummy movie

This is a much gorier take on mummy movies than Brendan Fraser's action-adventure franchise

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a title aimed at clarifying some things for audiences. Yes, this is a mummy-based horror movie, but it isn’t the latest installment in or remake of the beloved Brendan Fraser action-adventure franchise. Nor, for that matter, does it have anything to do with the last big movie titled The Mummy, which became the Dark Universe’s failure to launch, at least in that form. But instead of clearing things up, the possessive moniker seems to have raised further questions, namely “Who the hell is Lee Cronin?” with the possible follow-up of “Where did he get a mummy?” and “Was it the same place that John Carpenter got his Vampires?”

Cronin is slightly earlier in his career as a horror auteur than Carpenter was when his name started appearing in the titles of his films. The Mummy is Cronin’s third feature, though he had a high-profile sophomore outing with Evil Dead Rise. On its surface, his take on The Mummy (which hails from the Warner Bros.-owned New Line, not Universal) resembles that sorta-reboot, where a single mom menaces her kids and sister while possessed by a pesky Deadite spirit. Here, it’s a child menacing her parents and siblings while possessed by an ancient demon. There’s certainly an Evil Dead-like sensibility in the movie’s combination of horrific gore and gross-outs so over-the-top, they reach a macabre level of humor.

Yet this isn’t just an Evil Dead-ified The Mummy, nor strictly a demonic-kid story like The Omen, though some influence from that 1976 movie is certainly in the mix. Cronin has figured out a new, more cleverly ghastly route into the mummy mythology, preying on parental fears and playing up the squishy pliability of the human form.

Rather than focusing on ancient Egyptian royalty brought back to life as in the classic original Universal Monsters movies, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy opens with a seemingly normal Egyptian family poking around in a tomb beneath a farmhouse. Then the narrative switches over to an American family living in Cairo, where dad Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) works as a TV journalist while mom Larissa (Laia Costa) takes hospital shifts as a nurse. Larissa is expecting their third child, after the bickering Sebastián (Shylo Molina) and Katie (Emily Mitchell). Their relative domestic bliss is shattered when Katie is taken from the family’s yard, a nightmare as potent as any of the movie’s more supernatural-inflected horrors.

The police, including Detective Zaki (May Calamawy), make no progress with the case. Eight years later, the Cannon family has moved back to New Mexico, and youngest child Maud (Billie Roy) is around the same age Katie was when she disappeared. Then the seemingly impossible happens: Katie is found in the wreckage of a plane crash, alive, though not necessarily well. She finally returns to her parents, but despite their initial elation, something is clearly amiss.

As the family adjusts to Katie’s unsettling presence and the accompanying strange incidents around the home, Detective Zaki continues to investigate what actually happened to the child. Now played by Natalie Grace in a ton of grimy makeup, Katie doesn’t speak at first, and her limbs are gnarled and twisted in a way that brings to mind the mummy with the limited-mobility arm in 1940’s The Mummy’s Hand. Those old Universal Mummy films were, like most Universal Monster projects, about monstrous characters with lingering traces of humanity; resurrected mummies in particular are caught between life and death, their bodies partially preserved, while their essential selves remain elusive.

That’s the effect Cronin goes after with The Mummy, but he updates the concept with a new gruesomeness and the bonus transgression of this happening to a kid. Katie doesn’t look the same as her childhood self — she’s played by another actor entirely — yet she doesn’t exactly look like the teenager she should have grown into, either. Modern horror viewers will think of demonic possession — or of zombies, which these days are more common undead movie monsters than fusty old mummies.

Cronin doesn’t TP Katie with bandages. He does, however, find some novel and sometimes delightfully nasty variations on the idea of a resurrected body held together by its wrappings. At one point, he seems to be asking whether human skin itself might count as a form of tenuous bandage. Throughout the movie, Cronin works in grotesque close-ups that visually distort pieces of his characters’ bodies, whether mummy-affected or not: teeth, skin, eyeballs, and fingers are all fodder for his visual dicing. His favorite trick is the split diopter shot, which allows subjects in close-up and in the background to appear in clear focus within the same frame, with the negative space between them appearing especially fuzzy.

This effect is usually used sparingly, but it’s all over Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, mirroring the intense, unhealthy fixation of a parent’s potentially monomaniacal unease. These hyper-focused shots also turn Katie’s physical differences into uncanny abstractions of what her physicality “should” look like, placing her in an uncanny valley between preservation, resurrection, and reanimation.

As with Evil Dead Rise, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy sometimes occupies its own uncanny valley between empathy for its characters’ suffering and the gleeful relish Cronin brings to depicting it. Cronin nudges his characters toward an emotional resonance their characters are too thin to bear, even with good performances, afforded plenty of screen time. (The movie runs well over two hours, a stark contrast to the old Universal sequels, which mostly run about an hour each, and often feature heavy doses of reused footage.)

But this shortfall was more noticeable in Evil Dead Rise, as it competed with the memories of previous franchise entries that were funnier (Army of Darkness), more harrowing (The Evil Dead or its 2013 remake), or both (Evil Dead 2). Cronin’s Mummy is such a pointed variation on a less specific franchise that it’s easier to just enjoy the mischievous-sicko vibes as a novelty made with gusto.

Does that make it more effective as horror, or lessen its impact? It depends on what you’re looking for. Cronin only taps into adolescent unruliness as a gorehound orchestrator of mayhem, not a keen observer of Katie’s arrested condition between childhood and adulthood, which could have made a powerful metaphor. Similarly, the movie’s thread about parental neglect and/or sacrifice is wispy. As a carnival geek show, though, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy delivers the goods, and at greater volume than its unofficial predecessors. It isn’t as personal a movie as the possessive title implies, but the marketing is largely correct: For the first time in ages, a mummy presides over a real horror show.

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Lee Cronin’s The Mummy debuts in theaters on April 16.