Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
The Mummy ***½/**** starring Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy, Natalie Grace written and directed by Lee Cronin
by Walter Chaw Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feels like a lost Chicho Ibáñez Serrador joint, the completion of a loose trilogy (with Serrador’s Who Can Kill a Child? and The House That Screamed) comprising tough, thorny horrors centred on irresolvable grief and the excruciating suffering of children. The bulk of it even takes place in an old dark house like the one in The House That Screamed, and features one of Serrador’s countrywomen, Spanish actor Laia Costa, as half of an expat couple living in Cairo. Costa’s Larissa is pregnant. Her husband Charlie (Jack Reynor) is a journalist. They’ve been in the country for five months with their offspring, Katie (Emily Mitchell, then Natalie Grace as the older version (both are phenomenal)) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams, then Shylo Molina)–still resident aliens at a stressful moment in their lives. The theme of familial upheaval and unrest is the first of many teeming anthills The Mummy kicks over. (I almost want to say “literal cans of worms,” because the picture’s so overstuffed with disgusting images.) Another is the strain on a marriage when a child is lost, and the similarly unique strain when that child is recovered and requires constant supervision and care. Katie, see, is abducted. She’s the princess fair, the quarry of an evil witch. She’s spirited away through crowded city streets as her father gives chase. But Charlie’s hampered by supernatural interference. His vision narrows and he gets confused. And just like that, Katie’s gone.
The Mummy also evokes the Philippou Brothers’ Bring Her Back, in terms of both its themes and its relentless, intimate brutality; André Øvredal’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe, in following through on one of that film’s great missed opportunities involving tattoos stitched onto the underside of the skin; and Ali Abassi’s Holy Spider, of all things, owing to its journalism angle and strong female lead. At various points, I thought this movie would make for a good entry in The Exorcist franchise. Mostly, it struck me as the best Hellraiser movie since at least Hellbound: Hellraiser II, if not ever. Indeed, it plays like a lost story from Clive Barker’s Books of Blood, especially in a horrific sequence concerning an animated rosary and a crusading grandmother, [Where in the World Is] Carmen Santiago (Verónica Falcón), who is trying to pray the not-okay away. All of which might suggest that The Mummy is merely a shrine to other movies when, closer to the point, it’s a distillation of elements I enjoy from films I adore: children in peril, marriages under pressure, old dark houses, inventive gore, and monster hunters who don’t, for the most part, do stupid things. Think Sinister. Think When Evil Lurks. Whatever Cronin’s faults, his greatest strength is a palpable love for the genre. He’s no imbecile tourist, some indie darling trying to “elevate” horror. If you ask me, it’s mostly the other genres crying out for elevation.
I love the sequence where Katie’s abducted. Echoes of Neil Jordan’s fairytale interpretations (or those of Oz Perkins) as the implacably evil and timeless-feeling “The Magician” (Hayat Kamille) cajoles and coos, proffering a prized chocolate through a wire fence and a green hedge. If you’re a parent, you imagine this happening to your children, and it looks exactly this fevered, this sickening. Cronin fixates on the Magician’s teeth as she panders. Teeth, Cronin has said, are one of the main inspirations for this story. His mother died before she could see his last film (Evil Dead Rise), and he’s haunted by an incident involving the mortician and her teeth. In dreams, the loss of teeth represents a loss of control. I dream I lose mine almost nightly. Teeth chomp like wolf traps in The Mummy; they’re crooked, they’re stained, they bleed. At one point, some poor bastard just starts pulling theirs out, roots and all. The thought of that turns my knees to jelly. What really makes me sick, though, is degloving, and because this mummy’s “wrap” is actually skin, I spent much of the film staring off to the far left or far right of the screen and breathing through my…well, teeth, trying to keep my lunch down. This film wants to hurt you. I think it wants you to feel the pain Cronin is feeling for his mom. Explanation there, too, for the heroism of a trio of women (arguably a quartet, if you count The Magician), including a police detective, Zaki (May Calamawy), so devoted to the case that at one point she holds her voice box together with her fingers through a hole in her neck. I mean, how else can you squeeze out the right words in the proper order with a ventilated esophagus?
The Mummy is sticky. It’s about something. Maybe a great many things. Much like Leigh Whannell’s exceptionally sad Wolf Man, it is at its heart about grief. But what lingers for me is how delightful it is to get on a ride this capricious and unpredictable. Anything could happen to anyone…and does. Even to children. Especially children who do not deserve the inattention of adults who forget that their kids’ well-being is all that matters. What lingers for me is how Katie’s condition upon her return tests her parents’ ability–and willingness–to be her caretakers. When Katie is returned, she doesn’t speak and evinces little awareness of her surroundings. Her parents lock her up and tie her to the bed so she doesn’t “hurt herself,” but aren’t they just adding more trauma on top of already-unimaginable traumas? Part of Katie’s torment was being bound in a tight space. Is binding her to a new tight space really the road back? I’m thinking now of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu and its depiction of the treatment for a “hysterical” woman: sealing her up in a corset, then tying her to the bed. Charlie is selfish; Larissa may be generous to a fault. Charlie seemingly wants to institutionalize Katie; Larissa believes that what Katie needs is a mother’s attention. Neither is thinking clearly. They seek refuge in denial, depression, rage. They each blame the other’s culture.
The situation with Katie causes Charlie and Larissa to fight constantly. It’s their only form of communication, until they don’t even do that anymore. I have read complaints that the film is oddly paced and overlong, but this marriage on the rocks is well-drawn enough that I wanted to spend more time with Charlie and Larissa. A relationship disintegrating over the inability to save a child? Horror of a different, excruciating kind. I wanted more time with Carmen, too, a representative of a different time and place who loves Katie so much that it draws Carmen fatally to the fire. The Mummy is about not being the person you need to be when a loved one needs you the most, when they are at their most compromised physically and mentally. The question isn’t if you’ll still love me when I’m old, but rather if you’ll still love me when I’m objectively repulsive. It’s telling that Katie and her dad communicate by tapping on a coffin lid late in the show–telling in the sense that we often can’t find the right way to say the things we need to say before we’re separated by death. It’s like that scene in Let the Right One In on the train. Or the one in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where Miles’s dad tells him how sorry he is through a locked door, unaware that his son can’t answer because his voice has been taken away. It’s telling that what Charlie and Katie are spelling out across an unbridgeable void is that they love each other.
