Fair warning for those who show up for screenings of "Lee Cronin's The Mummy": The titular figure (er, the Mummy, not Lee Cronin) is the focus of some breakthrough disturbing imagery in the personal-grooming category. Credit is due to the titular director (Lee Cronin, not the Mummy) for engineering this landmark scene. I think it may be the single most revolting pedicure in the history of film.
This "Mummy" turns its back on the spirit of the adventure films starring Brendan Fraser and seeks an all-out horror effect with a well-deserved R rating. Its plot conjures up a powerful spirit from an ancient epoch: the era of Richard Nixon, when "The Exorcist" was released. Linda Blair-style antics are the main attraction, as a demon-infested girl scuttles around like a spider, crawls on the ceiling, upchucks with startling ferocity, plants evil in the minds of her siblings, and generally behaves in a manner that might be considered unusual even for a teen girl.
She, Katie (Natalie Grace), first appears in a prologue as the pre-adolescent child (the younger Katie is played by Emily Mitchell) of an American TV journalist (Jack Reynor) on assignment in Cairo. The girl gets tricked and abducted by the sorceress next door, at "the end of the garden," as we keep being told. (Mr. Cronin, an Irishman who wrote and directed the film, perhaps doesn't grasp that Americans would be more likely to say "in the back of the yard.")
Eight years later, the newsman, Charlie Cannon, and his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), have given up on finding Katie and are raising their other two children in Albuquerque, N.M., with the help of Larissa's devout Catholic mom, Carmen (Verónica Falcón). News arrives that, back in Egypt, after a sarcophagus was cast out in a plane crash, Katie turned up inside the coffin. Under a spell and wrapped up in bandages covered with mysterious writings, she has remained alive, albeit looking a bit like a corpse and locked in a deep catatonic state interrupted by sudden bursts of outré activity. Brought to Albuquerque in an effort to reintroduce her to normal life, she gets particularly huffy when Grandma recites Catholic prayers in an attempt to heal her. A real-world analogue would be the unpleasantness that erupts when parents ask teens to put away their phones.
Mr. Cronin, who is best known for the fifth "Evil Dead" film, 2023's "Evil Dead Rise," expends a lot of effort on establishing "The Mummy" as a detective story based in Cairo, where we learn via a lot of tedious investigative mumbo-jumbo that ancient demon-caused mummy-ness has been transmitted from one body to the next through time, like the world's longest-running game of tag. Mainly, though, the film is an exercise in high-decibel disgust generation. Ears will be split and stomachs churned. It is advisable not to see the movie immediately after a meal.
Or, really, ever. At two and a quarter hours, "The Mummy" runs at least a half-hour longer than is warranted by its routine story. The length is a byproduct of sheer self-indulgence on the part of the person who put his name above the title: Mr. Cronin trots out every gross-out horror trope he can think of, then repeats them again and again. Meanwhile his sound team keeps turning up the volume to 12, delivering shrieking, insistent layers of audio effects that are more annoying than scary.
Strips of flesh get painfully ripped off bodies, the grandmother makes obscene gestures after being infiltrated by the demon, and there are more scenes of cursed folk forcefully vomiting into one another's mouths than are strictly necessary. Even a day later, contemplating this willfully nauseating work carries much the same sensation as having ingested a plate of bad clams.