Lee Cronin’s The Mummy

Lee Cronin’s last film was Evil Dead Rise, an effective and often grotesque sequel to Sam Raimi’s low-budget classic. There was immediate talk of sequels and spin-offs but, given a little more road following its success, the Irish director has chosen an ostensibly different path. He breathes life – or death, more accurately – into another classic horror monster, with a spin on Egyptian mummies that's distinctly Raimi-esque in its goo and gore.

Midsommar’s Jack Reynor stars as Charlie Cannon, a rising star journalist on assignment in Egypt for several months with his two children and pregnant wife, Larissa (Laia Costa). But when his young daughter, Katie (Emily Mitchell) is abducted from their garden, their lives are overturned. The police, with the possible exception of idealistic young detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), suspect him of the crime, and no sign of Katie is found. It's quite some time before a strange accident returns her (now played by Natalie Grace) to the bosom of her family. Or at least, something that looks a lot like her.

Cue some impressively horrible experiences for the largely blameless Cannons. Cronin, who writes as well as directs, punctuates some slow-burn scenes with regular visceral scares; visceral in the literal sense that bodily organs do not always remain on the inside here. As well as the world’s most upsetting pedicure scene and frequent moments of body horror, Cronin dabbles in the supernatural, social awkwardness, food repugnance, ritualistic abomination and a kind of moral outrage that’s often hard to watch.

You can’t say that he doesn’t throw everything at the wall – sometimes literally 

You can’t say that he doesn’t throw everything at the wall – sometimes, again, literally – in an unhurried slow burn that builds to a horrible climax. But it can’t all stick. Many of the scares seem closer to European folklore around changelings and possession rather than strictly Egyptian curse traditions, and the visual language by the end is almost pure Evil Dead once more. The attempt to involve Egyptian characters in this exploration of the culture is welcome, but it’s undercut by the execution, which teeters towards tokenism or, worse, exoticism at times. 

That all said, there are good performances, particularly from Calamawy, Grace and Reynor, and Cronin’s portrait of a genuinely loving family who are trying their best to endure is compelling in a way that many random assemblies of nubile teen victims for these films are not. The film’s final moments mix compassion and vengeance to create something genuinely surprising, and if Cronin ultimately pulls a few punches in his body count, chances are you’ll be too traumatised by all the gore to notice.

In cinemas worldwide Fri Apr 17.