A young girl under demonic possession, an ancient curse unleashed, distraught parents with severe guilt, lots of projectile vomiting, demonic convulsions, large gashes on the face of the possessed, a young girl saying the vilest curse words, screechy violin music, and more. Lee Cronin's The Mummy is just The Exorcist wrapped in bandages. The film bears every stale trope endemic to the American horror genre, where grossing out the audience with spit and vomit and showing severely disfigured faces takes precedence over scaring them. The cliches employed by the film extend far beyond its obsession with nausea-inducing visuals. When a father teaches morse code to his daughter, you know she is going to use it to communicate with him from beyond the realm of the dead; to uncover the truth about the ancient curse the protagonist must sit through an archaeology class before politely approaching the professor later; of course the crucial information is inside a grainy VHS tape; the demon is so powerful that it can effortlessly desecrate any religious symbol; the possessed will always wait till the climax to take down everyone in a show of power that somehow happens at night and incites a storm; the person who finds crucial information that helps battle the demon must always be in another city (or a country in this case) and must hurry before everyone dies.

Director: Lee Cronin

Cast: Jack Reynor, Laia Costa, May Calamawy

It is not that these tropes aren’t fun, but that Lee Cronin’s The Mummy trudges through all of them in a mindless, joyless manner that you start fondly reminiscing about the times when you first saw these tropes in earlier (and much better) films. The premise is engaging enough: Parents lose their daughter while in Egypt, and eight years later, they find that she is alive and was discovered in a mummified state, transported in a three-thousand-year-old sarcophagus. One would think the writers would make the most of the abundant potential of the Egyptian setting and its history. But except for a sand storm, over-the-top Hollywood-Arabian accent, and wrapping the possessed girl in mummy bandages, this film could have been set anywhere. 

But, maybe, if it were set in the USA, it would have been painfully apparent how closely it resembled The Exorcist. The performances are competent enough, but they are let down by awkward editing and vacant attempts to build dread, which often interrupts the actors. Throughout the first hour of the film, the major drawback is its inability to build tension or evoke fear, despite repeated attempts. However, as the story unravels and starts to get bolder with its attempts to scare us, the film gets goofier. Almost no character seems to be terribly bothered by the fact that extraordinary events are happening right in front of them, until it's too late. Missing daughter returns as a Mummy? Sure, let’s take her home. She crawls through the walls, eats scorpions, and her skin peels off in reels? She probably needs time to adjust. You would think it is just that the parents are extraordinarily dumb. But no, in the middle of a wake, the demon-child cracks open the ceiling, eats her grandmother’s corpse in full view of a shocked guest. And then we cut to later in the night with the parents restraining their possessed daughter. We are never shown how the parents explained it away, or how none of the guests reported it to the police, or at least stayed over to see how it all ended.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is proof that not all forms of archaeology are welcome, and some mummies, and their cliches, need to stay buried.