Not to be confused with Universal’s The Mummy franchise, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy comes from Warner Bros, the studio that established The Conjuring universe, and it certainly has more in common with those supernatural horror films than anything else.
However, given the Orientalist and anti-Arab sentiment enmeshed in those Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz-led movies, it’s hard not to be sceptical about any Hollywood film grappling with Egyptian history — especially when it is written and directed by a white filmmaker.
With the casting of Egyptian-Palestinian actor May Calamawy and British-Iraqi actor Hayat Kamille, one hoped that Arabs would garner more favourable, authentic representation.
Comparatively, it does. Yet, as it transforms the classic, romanticised antagonist of The Mummy into an arbitrary demonic entity, Cronin does little to bolster the Egyptian texture beyond window dressing for, once again, a generic white family.
The action begins near Cairo, where an Egyptian family of five sings along to the radio on their way back to their nectarine farm.
Kamille, the stern matriarch, is driving their banged-up car, and she doesn’t share her husband’s or children’s joie de vivre.
With her dark brow and Bedouin tattoos on her hands, she’s set up as a mystical antagonist whose family is burdened with a dark secret: an ominous black sarcophagus lies deep beneath their home, and inside, a mummified corpse is about to awaken.
In the city, we meet the Cannons, a happy family preparing to return to the US as ambitious journalist Charlie’s (Jack Reynor) five-month secondment comes to an end.
His nurse wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), is pregnant with their third child, but while she’s at work, and Charlie is on the phone talking about a promotion, their daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell) is kidnapped by Kamille’s mother.
“I hope you can forgive me,” she utters before reciting an incantation, and a scarab beetle rushes into Katie’s mouth.
Charlie chases the woman through the busy streets, but she and Katie disappear into a mystical sandstorm.
Here, the archaic depiction of Cairo fails to truly capture the cosmopolitan city that it is — trapping it in a dusty time capsule where rare modernity is shown through plastic water bottles, some tech, plus gloomy, shadowy scenes in a police station and later in an archaeologist’s lab.
I do, however, appreciate how prevalent Arabic is, rather than completely anglicising proceedings.
Eight years later, the Cannons have returned to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Charlie has taken a dead-end local news job.
They’re living in Larissa’s mother’s home and still grieving their loss, but the Cannons’ dreams are answered after receiving a phone call saying Katie is alive — well, barely.
The sarcophagus is discovered with the young girl (now played by Natalie Grace) inside, grey-skinned, wheezing and unable to speak.
She looks like everything you would expect a mummified corpse to look like, but the doctors say she has locked-in syndrome and just needs to get better at home, so she is whisked back to the US and reinstalled in her old room as the family celebrates her return.
After a promisingly tense start, this is where the film truly forces you to suspend your disbelief.
Katie immediately becomes a feral menace, and a slew of gnarly scenes commence. She headbutts her grandmother, creepily scurries around the walls of the house, devours a scorpion, and during one painfully grotesque pedicure, Larissa rips her daughter’s skin off her leg.
You might think the god-fearing grandmother, carrying her rosemary beads and praying next to Katie, might suggest an exorcism, but she’s just as oblivious as her daughter to the extremely obvious evil at hand.
The cracks in Charlie and Larissa’s relationship begin to show after he makes a half-hearted plea to his wife to seek professional help, yet the script doesn’t delve deeper into the friction caused by the traumatic inciting incident.
Where a film like Bring Her Back similarly grapples with familial grief through a possessed child plot device, this film only offers a throwaway conversation about guilt and blame before a deluge of demonic possession tropes overwhelms the narrative.
The other children become ensnared by the evil presence, and even after a family member is brutally dispatched, no one is really questioning anything other than Charlie.
He embarks on a solo journalistic endeavour to work out what’s going on, but the ancient lore of this particular demon is superficially handled.
While he visits an archaeology professor for an exposition dump, Calamawy’s Egyptian police detective, Dalia, who has been investigating Katie’s kidnapping all these years, traces it back to the rural farm.
Calamawy is very good as the stoic officer, with her hardened, penetrating stare eating up the screen, but Dalia’s discovery of the demonic ritual is all too convenient, too trite.
There’s also the odd way she’s introduced, wearing a hijab, only to dispense with it eight years later without any explanation. Is she no longer a practising Muslim? Is this meant to be a symbol of secular awakening?
Characterisation in this film is so threadbare that it’s a struggle to decipher what genuine emotional journey the key players go on.
By the final act, and after the umpteenth pointless Bifocal (Split diopter) shot, the nastiness is turned up to 11.
A sadistic gorefest ensues as Dalia arrives to help banish the demon, ending in what could have been an emotionally poignant resolution for the horror.
Instead, the last scene serves up a vengeful conclusion that only leaves a bitter taste.
Hanna Flint is a British-Tunisian critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us. Her reviews, interviews and features have appeared in GQ, the Guardian, Elle, Town & Country, Mashable, Radio Times, MTV, Time Out, The New Arab, Empire, BBC Culture and elsewhere
Follow her on Instagram: @hannainesflint
