Lee Cronin’s The Mummy Review: Evil Dead Rise All Over Again —Shocking, Gory, But Not That Scary

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy (M18)

Starring Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy

Directed by Lee Cronin

Can a movie be shocking and not scary at the same time? Look no further than Lee Cronin’s The Mummy. Maybe I’m a tough customer. Or maybe the real world is a lot scarier than make-believe — the news headlines alone are terrifying. Anyhoo…

Irishman Cronin broke out with his 2019 debut, The Hole in the Ground, which led him to Hollywood, where he took on Evil Dead Rise, a reboot of Sam Raimi’s supernatural chiller franchise.

His latest, a collab with scream merchants Blumhouse and The Conjuring architect James Wan, is essentially another Evil Dead retelling, but wrapped in Egyptian lore — call it Evil Dead: Egyptomania — a gross-out mash-up of ancient hexes and The Exorcist-style possession (Jason Blum, you’re forgiven for The Exorcist: Believer).

The movie kicks off in Egypt — wait, no stock footage of the Sphinx and the pyramids… what a shocker — where an expat American family (Jack Reynor and Laia Costa) are devastated by the abduction of their young daughter, Katie. Cut to eight years later: the family has been uprooted to New Mexico, and Katie is suddenly discovered sealed inside a sarcophagus. But guess what? Katie — all scarred, deformed, and catatonic — isn’t exactly Katie anymore.

If you’ve come for the gore, goo, and everything in between, you won’t be disappointed. This thing is intense, packed with discomforting set pieces (the pedicure, the dentures, the skin-peeling — there’s no shame in covering your eyes… I know I did). Cronin really loves his split-diopter shots and deep-focus compositions, revisiting every visual trick in the Evil Dead Rise playbook and doubling down on them.

There’s a wickedly off-the-rockers wake sequence that reminds you this is Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, not Tom Cruise’s or even Brendan Fraser’s The Mummy (which has a fourth instalment on the way).

My favourite part has very little to do with blood and guts, though. It’s the procedural bit following an Egyptian cop (Moon Knight’s May Calamawy) looking into Katie’s disappearance. That stretch plays like a gripping whydunit — before spiralling down a familiar path of chaos and destruction, setting up a sequel-baiting epilogue that feels like a studio-mandated tag-on.

At its core, the movie is also an exploration of family trauma and sorrow, but it never quite reaches the emotional depths of Hereditary (Toni Collette’s meltdown is still etched in my memory) or Bring Her Back (that’s one downer). Cronin does his best to draw strong performances from his cast, but ultimately he seems more interested in making the viewers squirm than in making them feel.  

So, shocking? Yes. Scary? Strangely, not as much. Here’s the thing: once you start nitpicking the glaring plot holes and logic flaws — and there are quite a few (for starters, the abductors showed remarkably poor judgement in picking Katie, an expat … what were they thinking?) — the thrills lose their punch. If you can live with them, good for you. If not, that ride home is going to be interesting.

If you map out a Venn diagram, you’ll notice just how similar Evil Dead Rise and The Mummy are. Then again, why shouldn’t they be? So similar, in fact, you might suspect they share the same universe — I certainly think so. Spoiler alert: both stories feature archival audio recordings explaining the origins of their respective resident evil — and both date back to 1923. Maybe it’s something.

I thought this would be a movie I’d feel safer watching in the day. It wasn’t. I’m too busy trying to figure out how fast someone can get from Cairo to New Mexico. (3/5 stars) now in cinemas

Photos: Warner Bros Pictures