[COLUMN] Lee Cronin's The Mummy is a Horror Movie About Parenting | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, which is a pretty good time at the pictures. It is a little long, and it suffers from a CGI-heavy climax and an ending that feels like it resulted from test audience notes, but it is a properly gnarly horror movie that is not afraid to go grisly. So, beware. This piece is not bound to silence.

Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is a horror story about the nightmare of raising a teenager.

The film follows the Cannon family, married couple Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) and Larissa Santiago-Cannon (Laia Costa), who live in Cairo. Charlie is a reporter and Larissa is a nurse. One afternoon, their daughter Katie (Emily Mitchell, Natalie Grace) is abducted from the bottom of their garden. The police are unable to find her, until – eight years later – Katie literally falls out of the sky when a private plane crashes to Earth containing an Ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, with Katie inside.

The prologue to the movie is very steeped in parental anxieties. Charlie discovers that a mysterious stranger (Hayat Kamille) has been visiting Katie every day and giving her sweets while also swearing her to secrecy, evocative of the paranoia around “stranger danger.” The film also suggests the media fixation on the Madeleine McCann case, with a couple losing their daughter in a foreign country and becoming such a big news story that Charlie keeps a coffin full of cards from strangers.

As such, The Mummy immediately establishes itself as a horror movie about parents and children. This fits with Cronin’s larger filmography. Cronin made his debut with the Irish horror The Hole in the Ground, one of a spate of contemporary Irish horrors like You Are Not My Mother riffing on the idea of the changeling, a swapped child. Evil Dead Rise is focused on a pregnant woman (Lily Sullivan) who faces a horror nightmare with her sister’s three kids (Morgan Davies, Gabrielle Echols, Nell Fisher).

Indeed, The Mummy owes a surprising amount to The Hole in the Ground, in that it is quite literally about a child who is placed in a hole underground and emerges as a fundamentally different person, alien to their parents. In The Mummy, Katie is returned home eight years after her disappearance. She was a child when she left. Now she is a teenager. Predictably, the family find themselves dealing with a decidedly more malevolent presence than they would have anticipated.

The Mummy buries its metaphor about as deep as it buries the sarcophagus containing Katie, that is to say in a chamber that is buried under at most an inch of sand. Having been deprived of sunlight for eight years, Katie’s skin has scarred and chafed. Her body is changing. Charlie and Larissa start noticing strange stains around the house. Despite seeming to suffer from “locked-in syndrome” as a result of her trauma, the family begins to worry that Katie is sneaking out of her room.

In a broader sense, Katie has transformed from an innocent and adorable child into a complete monster. She is even a bad influence on her siblings, inspiring her sweet younger sister Maud (Billie Roy) to call her teacher (Lily Sullivan) a “rat-faced cunt” and start giving the middle finger to her older brother Sebastián (Shylo Molina). Katie begins manipulating the family around her in increasingly baroque and abstract ways.

There has been some debate about whether Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is “really” a Mummy movie. In reality, the Mummy franchise has, across its ninety year history, never really had a consistent identity. Boris Karloff only appears in the iconic make-up for a short scene at the start of the 1932 original, while that early run of films has the creature spending more time in contemporary Massachusetts or Louisiana than in Egypt or Cairo. This is to say nothing of Hammer’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb.

Cronin certainly delivers on the trappings of a classic Mummy movie. Katie is reintroduced bound like the classic movie monster, and spends slightly more time in the bandages than Karloff did in 1932. There is an entire subplot set in and around Cairo, fixated on an ancient cult dedicated to caging and trapping the monster in a tradition that stretches beyond the Pharaohs. More broadly, the fixation on a white woman serving as a vessel for an ancient Egyptian evil is as consistent a throughline as exists across the expansive Mummy franchise.

All that said, it is perhaps revealing that Lee Cronin’s The Mummy feels as much like an Exorcist film as it does the latest entry in the Mummy franchise. To be fair, the two series have always been somewhat intertwined. There is an extended prologue at the start of The Exorcist following Father Merrick (Max von Sydow) encountering the demon Pazuzu during an archeological dig in the Middle East, albeit in modern-day Iraq rather than Egypt itself.

This makes sense. The Exorcist is a movie about parental anxieties concerning the parenting of a teenage girl in a turbulent world. Cronin leans into this comparison with scenes of Katie tied to a chair and hovering in the air. At one point, a crucifix runs up the leg beneath the skirt of her grandmother (Verónica Falcón) before Katie throws the older woman out of her bedroom window, both narrative beats lifted directly from William Friedkin’s classic.

It is eventually revealed that Katie has been possessed by an ancient demon that was “known as the destroyer of families.” While The Mummy is an overtly supernatural horror movie about a timeless evil that has crossed oceans and millennia to terrorize the Cannon family, it also feels like an attempt to capture the emotional reality of trying to parent an out-of-control child. It is also about a set of deeper parental anxieties.

The theme of domestic violence and abuse permeates the film. When Katie goes missing, Charlie very quickly realizes that he and Larissa are being interviewed as suspects, because statistics indicate that the most likely responsible party in the case of child abduction or abuse is a family member. When Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) investigates the cult responsible for taking Katie, she finds that their surviving child (May Elghety) has had her tongue cut by her mother.

In the abstract, it is revealed that the ancient cult has spent generations keeping that ancient evil trapped to protect the larger world. In a recording on a cassette tape, the woman who abducted Katie explains that they use children because the bodies last longer as a receptacle for evil. It is in some ways a horror movie twist on The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, a classic science fiction story in which a utopia is built upon the suffering of a child locked in a dungeon.

There are various ways in which that metaphor can be interpreted, but it often has a colonial connotation. Those people who live in rich nations avail a prosperity that is often a direct result of the suffering inflicted on the inhabitants (especially children) of developing nations. The Mummy franchise has arguably always been preoccupied with colonial anxieties, the fear that western imperialism might awaken some vengeful monster, and that is certainly at play here.

After all, the central premise of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is that this case involving Katie is special because the cult has chosen a white child rather than a local kid to suffer as part of this ritual. After all, there is a long history of children disappearing in Egypt and never returned. The disappearance of a young white girl (whether in the United States or abroad) generates a different sort of narrative and tends to garner more coverage, raising uneasy questions about how lives are valued.

There is something else simmering away behind these anxieties. Charlie is a reporter, and he is introduced covering climate change leading to rising water levels in the Nile Delta. It is later revealed that Katie was on that plane because the cult had to move her – the first time they had had to move a possessed body in their history – because the valley was soon to be flooded. While it never takes focus, there is a climate change anxiety permeating the film.

One of the big anxieties about having children concerns the world that those kids will inhabit. Surveys suggest that four-in-ten young people are nervous about having kids, knowing what climate change will do to the planet in their own lifetime. This is its own variation on the horror at the heart of The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas and reflected in the torture of Katie in The Mummy, imagining a world where modern generations profit while the bill is left to be paid by their children.

Of course, climate change is just one reflection of the various challenges facing a child growing up in the modern world. Children are inheriting a world where they are less likely to be more financially stable than their parents and a world that is far less politically stable. This explains why, at the climax of the film, Charlie chooses to take the demon possessing Katie into himself. Charlie embraces his daughter, what initially appears as a struggle but becomes a hug, as he accepts the demon.

It is the ultimate act of self-sacrifice – albeit one somewhat undercut by an ill-judged final scene that feels like a note from test screening audiences in which Charlie passes the curse on – in which a parent accepts the horrors being visited upon their child for themselves, so that the kid might be spared the suffering. It’s a really satisfying emotional climax to the story, serving a direct inversion of the torment that the cult has chosen to inflict upon Katie.

It might be called The Mummy, but Lee Cronin’s made a pretty compelling horror about what it’s like to raise a daughter in this modern world.