Reviews
‘Lee Cronin’s The Mummy’ Review: A Reboot With Mixed Results
As far as conflicted films go, Lee Cronin’s The Mummy is one of the most divided in the past decade for horror. Not divisive, but divided in what it wants.
Unlike Cronin’s previous adventure with Evil Dead Rise, The Mummy is a cinematic house that is barely standing, given just how divided it is. Rise had a clear goal, and a clear tone for what it was worth: it was to deliver splatter house violence that is more fun than it is pulse-poundingly scary, flooding the stage that was set for it with thousands of gallons of blood and all you’d expect from the series. In all regards, Cronin succeeded in continuing the pretty much unblemished heritage of the Evil Dead franchise by sticking to the plan. The same can’t be said of The Mummy, which suffers in its composition and mood despite being excellent on a special effects level.
The Mummy: A Family Focused Reboot of a Classic Monster
Throwing the Boris Karloff out with the bathwater, Cronin’s run at a reboot pulls focus away from the plot of the original. Instead, we follow the curious tale of the Cannon family: eight years prior, expats Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa) lost their daughter Katie to a mysterious kidnapper while living in Cairo. After a grueling, inconclusive hunt, they’ve begun to settle into their lives back in Albuquerque, with their son Seb and youngest daughter Maud.
But that relative peace is upended when government officials alert them that Katie (Natalie Grace) has been found, pulled out of a mysterious sarcophagus from a plane crash in the Egyptian countryside. Catatonic and bizarrely deformed by an ordeal she refuses to speak of, the couple brings her home in hopes of rehabilitating her. But Katie has brought back much more than her physical and mental trauma, carrying a passenger who is determined to hurt the Cannons in the worst of ways.
Two Films (Unfortunately) Trapped in One Body
The chief problem with telling this story of a troubled little girl reintegrating into her family is that The Mummy is split by two distinct and conflicting desires: to be crude, and to be contemplative. This reboot is two films that have been, ironically, Frankenstein’d together rather than neatly wrapped up. It’s easy to see the stitches are very, very messy.
One movie is a gross-out body horror circus, trying to get you to gag and drop your jaw with its vulgar displays of bad taste; it succeeds quite often on that part. The other film is a dark, moody, supernatural mystery that is literally half a world away in both location and tone; while the Cannons struggle in New Mexico, a cop back in Cairo (Detective Zalki, played by May Calamawy) does the legwork to figure out who exactly took Katie and uncovers an ancient force behind it.
Truth be told, Zalki’s B-plot is the more compelling of the two. Calamawy’s determined gumshoe, whose success rate is counted in dead missing persons and degrees of frustration, is tragic and strongly written. The bits of wisdom she drops hint at much more fascinating themes than the vomit-laden A-plot ever builds up to.
Enough Subtlety, Let’s Get Grossed Out Together
While the first twenty minutes hint at a cultural and emotional tension between the Cannons and Detective Zalki, a brick wall is quickly erected between them as Charlie and Larissa retreat into a completely different movie: a mean-spirited, Evil Dead-esque possession film that gives you, for all intents and purposes, a little girl Deadite that is one of the creepiest and grossest of all time.
This isn’t an attempt at pigeon-holing Cronin, this is just a byproduct of a director who is clearly inspired by one of the greatest of all time and trying to pay homage. Or at the very least, a director who would like to stay in the realm of the grotesque and campy just a little longer. And campy it is. The film we get stateside is a parade of depravity with over-the-top dialogue, obscenity, and bodily harm that flies even higher than that. It’s a runtime chock-full of absurdly nasty bodily humors being thrown, oozing and puking, and splattering around like a bile filled Jackson Pollock. The directing is frenetic and tight, and aside from Cronin’s intervention worthy addiction to split-diopter shots, it’s all at least competently made, even when it’s indulging in some Raimi-isms.
Why Does The Mummy Not Feel Like A Mummy Movie?
But despite the technical skill behind its camerawork and effects (and trust, the nauseatingly gooey effects were enough to garner physical reactions), it’s impossible to ignore how The Mummy’s disparate halves are strangling each other, making both sides of the story weaker and choking the pacing.
As Zalki’s investigation into the occult hits its stride, we have to quickly make way for the next set piece involving whatever foul, bloody nonsense Katie is up to. Then once you start to settle into the cartoonish violence of the Cannons’ distressing situation, you’re inevitably thrust back into Zalki’s slow prowl for answers. As the cycle of the two eating at each other continues, it doesn’t just leave you feeling tonal whiplash; it also pads the runtime and turns what could have been a tight hundred-minute creature feature into a problematic two hours and change. By the time the two storylines do meet back up, the damage has already been done.
A Fractured Vision Undermines The Mummy’s Potential
Bisected and then messily put back together again, the two halves of Lee Cronin’s The Mummy fail to maintain consistency. It was already a bizarre choice to play a mummy movie to the tune of an American-based possession film, and an even more bizarre choice to isolate the Egyptian iconography of the film to a very different side plot. But the real oddity is how much potential both halves squander in the process of trying to have their cake and eat it too.
Of all the horror movies to be described as a runaway train, Rob Savage’s Other Mommy is the first in recent memory to have that quality as a negative. A more focused piece of over-the-top supernatural horror would capitalize on starting at a high speed and just gunning it. It would get increasingly faster, more horrific with its effects and reveals, more stunning and spectacle-filled. But Other Mommy never utilizes the momentum it starts with. It stays at the same steady, uncomfortable pace. And it gets old, very fast.
Other Mommy Is Missing a First Act
The movie begins in what should have been the second act; it never does stop haunting the narrative that Other Mommy feels like it’s missing 30 minutes of setup and 10 minutes of breathing room that would actually get you to care about what’s happening. Bela (Arabella Olivia Clark) is a young girl already well acquainted with a creature known as Other Mommy. A supernatural being that can change shape and size to her liking, becoming anyone she wants and then some. The entity only desires one thing: for Bela to let it into her heart and give it a new body.
Bela’s parents, Ursula (played by Jessica Chastain, in a dual role as the Other Mommy) and Russell (Jay Duplass), become aware of the space-bending creature in the film’s very first scenes. Soon, they’re on the run from the creature that’s trying to tear the already strained family apart. But the overwrought family drama of an unfaithful mother and a scatterbrained father forced to hide their struggling marriage from their kid is smothered. Much like Chastain’s performance, it’s drowned out by a barrage of aggressive and unimpressive digital effects trying to milk every single moment for a fright, desperate to keep audiences’ attention.
A Clumsy Digital Effects Showcase That Smothers the Story to Death
Other Mommy is primarily concerned with showing off its titular monster and her reality-bending powers, jumping from one “scare filled”, dreamlike sequence to the next; heavy, heavy quotes on scare filled. You become inured to every trick the film has as it shows you all the most unimaginative uses of a shapeshifting, size changing monster possible. There is no clever framing or use of shadow to obscure it, no restraint at all really. The directing is frenetic and clumsy, but it makes sure to make the monster as clear as possible. It’s all out in the open, plain to see, and bizarrely mundane for a depiction of a demonic interloper.
Every jumpscare-a-minute scene moves too fast and is too overlit to ever scare. The bright and inappropriate atmosphere fails the already rough looking digital effects. What it amounts to is a choppily edited and disjointed assortment of scenes, with weak imitations of Trevor Henderson style abominations center stage. Tall and small and melty variations of a CGI Chastain, none of them work to evoke tension or fear or any emotion other than the occasional eyebrow raise for how goofy some of them look.
There are a few moments where Chastain teases at playing the monster effectively without face and body morphing effects, sporting a genuinely disturbing countenance and creepy voice. But as soon as these fragments of interest come, they’re washed away by warping her into a lanky, slinking monster of ridiculous proportions. What we get out of the dual role is a boring creature for the feature, and a dry, one-dimensional protagonist, both squandering the phenomenal actor Chastain is.
Other Mommy is Full of Dull Performances and Squandered Potential
Duplass offers little with his supporting role, providing flat dialogue and flatter comic relief as a middling SNL sketch’s idea of a clownish father. It’s worth noting Clark actually provides the most interesting performance among the entire cast, a feat impressive from such a young child actor. But even her endearing and heart-breaking time as Bela is too little and too shadowed by the faulty composition of the film it’s trapped in.
The trailer for Other Mommy may have caught audiences off guard at the cinema in the past few months. But ultimately, that trailer showed the movie’s entire hand. Other Mommy is a pasty, crooked collage of elements from the supernatural horror movies producer James Wan made the backbone of the genre a decade ago. That doesn’t make it a throwback; just a rehash of cliches, with no structure and no sense of cohesion. It never amounts to anything more interesting than what the marketing material showed, which is a tragic end for a film, if there ever was one.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a movie simultaneously charged with and mired in ambition. It’s genuinely comical how overly ambitious of a first-time film it is for writer-director Juan Diego Escobar Alzate: a microbudget, shot on location in the mountains of Colombia, character driven psychological horror film meant to explore the very nature of good and evil while also tackling cults and misogyny.
So, it’s shocking how much of it works. Not all of it works, not at all, but it is cohesive enough to serve as a surprising experience with the colorful aesthetic it employs and incredibly dark places it goes to.
What Is Luz: Flower of Evil About?
After the death of their mother Luz, three sisters in a rural cult community find their faith waning. The three are the centerpiece of an elaborate theology crafted by their cult leader father, a man who is becoming more difficult to deal with by the day. So, when he brings a mute boy into town, chaining him up and claiming he’s the people’s messiah, an already tense situation devolves into outright madness. What ensues is the slow dissolution of the cult, and the torturous end of an already fractured family.
Let this usual synopsis section also serve as a content warning: the film does depict sexual violence very early on, about 25 minutes into the film. It’s not Irreversible levels of horrifically long, but it’s also not particularly brief and still graphic content by its nature. It can be difficult to stomach, so I’m mentioning it now for those who would rather avoid that sort of thing.
A Ponderous Arthouse Folk Horror About Good and Evil
The film has shocking moments, but it’s not very interested in shock value. This is first and foremost a slow burn, a piece of arthouse folk horror that is more about bleeding out than it is about a violent demise. The most obvious comparisons are to The VVitch and Midsommar, but even that feels like an inappropriate mix, even when it leans towards Aster’s commercial darling or Egger’s colonial nightmare.
Fundamentally, Luz is a study about people who mythologize suffering and cruelty and excuse it as being driven by outside spiritual forces rather than their own decisions. It’s about deconstructing harmful religious and cult mentalities, and it wears its philosophy on its sleeve (aggressively so). Alzate creates a visually and textually fascinating meltdown of his characters and the community they find themselves within.
I would say it’s a “descent into madness” if it didn’t feel clear that the characters were already in a tailspin right at the film’s outset. The script, especially through its second act, starts to feel repetitive and a little simplistic, with a somewhat anticlimactic ending and dialog that starts to feel less naturalistic and more tedious. But it’s an interesting dissection of a family, even if it’s rough around the edges.
Hyperreal Sense of Color, But Shaky Directing and Writing
The film’s most obvious and striking feature is its hyperrealist palette, bearing a rich Technicolor aspect that permeates throughout the entire runtime. Colorist Felipe Martinez U paints the mountainous countryside with such vibrancy, a simple but very effective contrast to the dying days of a cult the story centers on; bleak, muddy times, punctuated by vibrant nature all around. Aesthetically, it’s pretty clearly visually inspired by the early works of Pedro Almodóvar and the visual warmth of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man.
Even the naturalistic tendencies of Terrence Malick make an appearance here, though how much of that is just in the gorgeous location scouting and how much is actually emulated by Alzate is up for debate. All around, the film lacks polish. The camerawork is amateurish in some ways, slightly cramped and occasionally uninspired in its framing. Sometimes the oversaturated look of the film can feel a little saccharine and heavy, but the pop of color here feels purposeful enough that I can forgive it as being highly stylized rather than trying to mask the weak points of a first-time director.
Is Luz: The Flower of Evil Worth the Watch?
In the search for great Latin American horror, Luz was an odd duck to stumble upon to be certain. But I’m a champion of strange birds with a lot of character, so you do the math.
Luz: The Flower of Evil is a struggle of a film, hard to watch at points despite how visually appealing it can be. It’s a brutal, bleak piece of psychological folk horror that certainly has a thin audience and will test the patience of even those the premise appeals to. But it does have as much substance as it does style, even when it treads into murky waters, and for that I think it’s worth the watch.
