133 minutes, now showing
★★★★☆
The story: The Cannon family are expats in Egypt. Charlie (Jack Reynor) and his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) are horrified when their daughter Katie (Natalie Grace) goes missing, possibly kidnapped. Grief-stricken, the couple return to New Mexico in the United States. Eight years later, Cairo detective Dalia (May Calamawy) tells them that the girl they thought was dead has been found alive. But the Katie the parents knew is gone – the rescued girl is mute and shockingly disfigured.
Who is Lee Cronin and why is his name in the title? The Irish film-maker made two well-received films, the supernatural thriller The Hole In The Ground (2019) and the demon-possession franchise movie Evil Dead Rise (2023). But his horror credentials are nowhere as illustrious as, for instance, American scare-genre auteurs Wes Craven and John Carpenter.
The writer-director’s name is there to tell viewers that this work is not like the other Mummy movies, a list which includes the much-loved three-movie action-adventure franchise (1999 to 2008) starring Brendan Fraser, as well as the disastrous 2017 Tom Cruise blockbuster that prioritised car crashes and explosions over crypts and ancient curses.
The central spine of Cronin’s version is the changeling story, an old myth about the child who is secretly replaced with a parasitic monster. It is scary enough on its own, but more terrifying when understood as a metaphor for a childhood illness or disability that sucks the life out of a family.
This is familiar turf for Cronin, whose first feature The Hole In The Ground is based on Irish folk myths of one who comes back from the other side a little less, and a little more, than human.
There is something horrifically wrong with Katie, with the rest of the film becoming a mournful exploration of the soul-sapping consequences of Charlie and Larissa’s unconditional love for their daughter.
Cronin skilfully renders the parental dilemma in terms as stark as they are queasy. Rarely has an M18 rating worked as hard to cover the splatter the film’s visual effects team obviously enjoyed bringing to life. The gore is as intimate as it is disgusting; the climax is a tour de force of biological spray.
It is gag-inducing and over the top, but Cronin exerts masterful control, never letting the proceedings lapse into silliness. The stakes – a girl’s soul – are never diminished, despite the blackly comic visual set pieces.
The story is driven by a central mystery around Katie’s disappearance, one involving an Egyptian police procedural sub-plot. This thread gives the story not just ticking-clock suspense, but also mythological heft. One engine of horror – the creepy child – is wrapped inside another horror trope, that of the reanimated corpse, as tightly as the bandages around an embalmed body.
Hot take: Changeling folklore has been grafted onto mummy mythology to deliver a gruesomely inventive family horror that earns every drop of its M18-rated splatter.