Joel on Film

It is probably a good idea, when given the opportunity, not to bring home your long-lost daughter, especially if the said offspring had gone missing for eight years and was found, still alive, in a 3,000-year-old sarcophagus. Of course, “still alive” is a relative phrase in the case of the girl in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, who returns to her parents partially comatose, except in the moments of—as the doctor puts it diplomatically—“sudden movement.” Why, for that matter, would any parent not think twice upon seeing her physical state of pruned skin, overlong toenails, rotted teeth and blank, deathly stare, before determining that the best place for her is the family home?

This is the type of movie that is not so much bad but disappointing, given that writer/director Lee Cronin (who has had his name attached awkwardly for copyright purposes, so as not to seem like the film belongs to a certain action-movie franchise) has crafted a work of truly grotesque horror here. The version of Katie that returns to her parents, following those years of comatose captivity inside the Egyptian stone coffin, is played by newcomer Natalie Grace in a thoroughly convincing performance both physically and psychologically. The prosthetic effects work is fittingly disgusting and even slightly mortifying, especially a bit involving a particularly difficult toenail.

There’s also something Grace does, though with her eyes, performing a credible imitation of absolutely, positively nothing through deadened eyes that have lost their humanity. It’s such a good performance, in fact, that it throws the weaknesses around her into sharp relief. Her parents Charlie and Larissa, for instance, are played by Jack Reynor and Laia Costa, respectively, in such awkwardly calibrated turns that it oddly becomes difficult to believe them as parents desperate for answers about their missing child.

It happens as an extended prologue to the story, taking place largely in Cairo, where a mummy’s curse claims lives through a kind of transference. That’s probably a slight clue as to why Katie (played as a younger girl by Emily Mitchell) gets caught up in the “magic trick” that leads to her disappearance. Charlie, whose job as a field reporter for a major news station has taken him about as far as he’d like, is on the precipice of getting a new position back in the States when Katie, lured by a mysterious neighbor to her doom, disappears on the back of a motorcycle.

The local police aren’t any help, of course, because the chief believes the parents probably killed their daughter and are securing an alibi. His detective in charge of searching for missing children (played by May Calamawy) is more sympathetic and less likely to accuse Charlie and Larissa of the unthinkable, though, and promises within her limited capacity to try and help. Eight years pass: Katie’s younger brother (Shylo Molina) becomes bitter and angry, and she gets a younger sister, too, named Maud (an amusingly potty-mouthed Billie Roy).

The family has now relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and joined Larissa’s zealously religious mother (Verónica Falcón), which comes in handy upon Katie’s mysterious return, found stashed in a sarcophagus that survived a plane crash. There is, obviously, something wrong with Katie, though, and that’s what the rest of the film is devoted to exploring. Again, “devoted to exploring” is a fairly relative term, since Cronin’s entire game here is to show us as many gruesome and grotesque sights as possible.

It’s an onslaught of goop and goo and blood and vomit and probably several other bodily fluids and functions that are all twisted up by Katie’s catatonia, but the first problem here is that Cronin has basically made a dark comedy out of a harrowing scenario. We laugh at the absurdity of just how much gory freakishness can be mined out of this material, but something catches in our throats, especially in a finale that just turns into a freak show. We learn the deadly serious truth of what happened to Katie via two resources (a video tape as helpful as it is inexplicable, an archeology professor—played by Mark Mitchinson—who appears solely to translate some writings).

The payoff, though, is an elongated journey (in which, really, not much happens to justify the 133-minute running time) toward a predictable outcome, a twisted sort of self-sacrifice, a rubbery digital effect and the suggestion of a sequel. Lee Cronin’s The Mummy has a decent horror movie hiding inside of it, but what we have here is both too much and too little.

Rating: ** (out of ****)