Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a cold reboot to The Mummy franchise, which ditches the swashbuckling archaeological adventure for an ordinary, mundane family. The father, Charlie, is an American journalist living in Cairo, Egypt, with his wife Larissa and their young son and daughter. The daughter, Katie, is soon abducted by what seems to be an Egyptian witch, and all efforts to recover her are futile.
Eight years later, a 4,000-year-old sarcophagus is found in a plane wreck. When scientists open the sarcophagus, they find a mummy swathed in dressings bearing a strange, ancient script. Unwrapping it, they’re horrified to discover the body is that of a teenage girl… and she’s alive.
The tragedy of Katie’s disappearance is made all the more anguishing for the family when they are reunited with her—now 17 years old—and find that she is disfigured beyond recognition and is unable to speak or communicate in any way about what happened to her. Now they must try to integrate Katie back into the home, but it doesn’t take long for her to begin to show strange and worrisome behaviour.
As a storyline, the events of the film occur in isolation to the dark cosmic lore of ancient Egypt we’ve come to expect from a tale about resurrected mummies. Most people have no experience in Egyptian tombs, but everyone can understand the uncomfortable idea of a family torn apart and put back together in a way that is disturbing and ghastly. It’s for that reason that this film can (and should) be presented as its own standalone story, rather than piggybacking off a classic franchise. The mummy theme does not add to the ambience of the film and is quickly forgotten, and what we’re left with is a fairly generic body-horror story.
The best examples of emotional horror are Hereditary (2017) and Midsommar (2018), where the fear is derived from a feeling of being inexplicably unsafe in what should be an ordinary situation, rather than unrelenting gore.
The Mummy misses this point. It has spooky events for the sake of spooky events, gore for the sake of gore, and characters who don’t behave like real people, instead acting as convenient plot devices that make inexplicable choices that only serve to disconnect the viewer from any sense of that feeling that this could be you.
It’s that subliminal ability to relate to a horror protagonist that gives a viewer the chills, and if a character behaves unrealistically just for the plot to happen, the suspension of disbelief is shattered.
While technically well shot, the film suffers from poor writing and uncompelling acting, particularly embodied through an insufferable performance from Jack Reynor, who seems to have drawn inspiration for the character of Charlie from a thick plank of wood.
Die-hard horror fans may enjoy The Mummy, but if you’re looking for an interesting storyline and gripping performances from talented actors, you could probably stand to sit this one out.