How do you suppose Lee Cronin has joined the ranks of the known-commodity director class whose names are integrated into the film’s title (a la Alfred Hitchcock, or John Ford)? This possessory credit, as it is known, is generally afforded to those filmmakers or writers whose individual fame in a given genre is believed to add luster to the production (e.g. Agatha Christie’s Murder On The Orient Express).
To date, the Irish director has only two other features under his belt: The relatively successful Evil Dead Rise, from 2023, which made solid money for Warner Bros., and the heralded indie horror flick The Hole in the Ground, which made certain waves at the festival circuit back in 2019.
Other than maybe having a hell of an agent, there isn’t much we can speculate on, there, but in his short oeuvre, we can draw one significant conclusion: He has a definite penchant for what we can call ‘Family Intergenerational Mechanics’ horror (the label’s still being workshopped).
The Hole in the Ground is a classic changeling flick: A sweet, young boy suddenly transforms into a hellish demon-spawn to his young mother’s shock, leading her to believe her actual son is trapped somewhere (perhaps a hole in the ground…?), while this demonic imposter tries to take his place. Cronin’s entry in the reimagined Evil Dead franchise, likewise finds a mother taken over by a demonic force, attempting to kill not only her children, but also her sister before meeting her end (?) in a wood chipper. So, essentially, as Cronin’s cinematic signature, we have family members replaced by demons, and traumatic blood and gore at every turn.
Which, finally, brings us to The Mummy, not a remake of the much-beloved 1999 Brendan Frasier vehicle; nor connected to the much-reviled 2017 Tom Cruise misfire (poorly received to the point that it shut down the fledgling Universal monster “Dark Universe” before it really even began). This film begins, of course, in Cairo, Egypt, where we eventually meet a young American family, including patriarch Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor), an on-the-rise broadcast journalist stationed in Egypt, along with his pregnant RN wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), and their two young children, Katie (Emily Mitchell), and her kid brother, Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams).
Things seem to be going swimmingly for the couple — Charlie has just gotten word that he’s been hired for a huge promotion in New York — but on the very day he receives this bit of news, Katie, playing out back in their verdant backyard, is kidnapped by a witch-like wraith (Hayat Kamille) we meet in the film’s opening minutes. Despite the family’s best efforts, and the work of a dedicated Egyptian detective, Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), the case is unresolved and Katie remains missing.
Jumping ahead eight years, the family is now back at Larissa’s gloomy ancestral home in Alberquerque, along with her mother, Carmen (Veronica Falcón), Charlie having been regulated to a local TV producer’s role, and his wife working at a local hospital. The mostly grown Sebastian (now played by Shylo Molina), and his parents, are joined by new kid sister, Maud (Billie Cannon), and Katie’s existence is mostly only alluded to, at least up until the couple get a phone call that their daughter has been found alive, back in Egypt.
The downside is, she seems to have spent the last few years inside a sarcophagus, and has some prominently different features than she had before. Cronin cannily plays this part out, juxtaposing only Katie’s twisted mouth in the foreground of her startled parents. Bound to a wheelchair, unable to speak, and with extended claws for fingernails, Katie is brought by the Cannon clan back home in an attempt to ease her back into regular society, but back in New Mexico, things go from bad to worse.
Soon, she’s exhibiting possessed Regan MacNeil-esque behaviors (eating bugs, torturing her siblings, vomiting copiously, and scarpering along the ceiling of their home like a water bug), and, worse, young Maud seems to also be under her spell, leaving their miserable parents to settle what seems to be an ancient curse inflicted on them from the realm of hells.
Cronin is gifted at setting the table, so to speak, giving us enough unsettling visual detail to infuse a spooky scene with enough macabre energy to keep the viewer jumping. He’s also not afraid to take his films well past the usual, easily forgettable, levels of basic gore of the standard horror film. His kills tend to stick in the psyche: In the course of the film’s more than two-hour runtime, we witness a character get impaled through the throat, not once but twice, a young person forcibly pulling out all the teeth out of their jaw, plenty of bloody sputum, a scorpion lasciviously chewed up and devoured, and a character falling out of a window and getting graphically eaten alive by a pack of coyotes.
Beyond the gross-out bits, Cronin, working from his own script, also seems to delight in setting up his familial groups with slightly cheesy, Hollywood-style group dynamics — the in-jokes and geniality shared amongst loving parents and their adoring children — only to subvert the living hell out them when the demons come calling (young Maud, when we first meet her, comes across as a kind of sit-com style kid sister, all smiles and quips, until Katie infuses her with demonic energy, whereby she sits at her school desk snapping a pair of scissors menacingly, and calls her teacher a combination of profanities that would make Tony Soprano blush).
The film does feel a bit longer than it needs to be, even as the best scenes are taut and gripping, and the story makes certain leaps of logic that don’t make a ton of real-world sense. It’s not a perfect film by any means — leading man Reynor has essentially one bug-eyed expression to show his alarm; the climax, while not unearned, isn’t particularly creative — but Cronin’s commitment to truly unsettling his audience is a winning approach to a genre that all too often settles for the bland and stultifyingly predictable. Happily, for a film all about familial dynamics, it is decidedly not intended for the whole family.
