A puzzle to solve, subtitles to read, narrative gaps to fill. A clever film yanks us into the story. A black mini-pyramid rests on a shallow mound of sand. A black trapdoor appears a meter or so to one side. Yellow light enters through a large square cut into the roof. We are underground. The set must have taken ages to design and build. But what is it? In any event, we discover that we are are in Cairo. “Lee Cronin’s The Mummy” (Warner Bros), showing now at the Montrose Playhouse, is an above-par gory horror with a murder-mystery subplot.
“Babe,” Charlie, a television-news correspondent, says. “Do I move my hands too much when I’m on T.V.?” “Isn’t it one of your ticks?” his wife Larissa, a nurse, asks. “Potentially very annoying to my fans,” he says. They have two children. A delightful shot of the happy family—peering over a brick wall, camera positioned below, and angled upwards to the blue sky—belongs on their mantelpiece. The phone rings. “Do you want that breakfast-news gig?” Charlie’s boss asks.
But while packing to fly home to New Mexico, their little girl Katie disappears. Charlie runs hither and thither—amidst the streets lined with Coke adverts, and underneath the bunting and clothes lines, and between Egyptian women escaping the dirty-yellow dust storm. The foghorn-like music is so loud that we can’t hear his screams.
Charlie and Larissa are wealthy and media-savvy. People all around the world join the search. A treasure chest brims with well-wishers’ cards. But police believe that Charlie “accidentally killed her and [is] trying to cover it up.” Charlie finds a stash of wrappers from eaten chocolate bars. Brother Seb confesses that Katie let him in on a secret. About what? About “her friend who gives them to her at the end of the garden.” “Sounds like she was being groomed,” says the sceptical police chief. The audience watches Katie eating a live cockroach the size of her fist. She has been possessed.
Eight years later the couple have another daughter and live in one of those remote houses which looks like it belongs in a horror movie. Seb’s mum says “no” to a school trip. “You’re just scared something’s gonna happen to me,” he says, “but I’m not Katie, Mom.” Dad cuts in—“Watch it, Seb.” The setting looks like Cairo without the buildings. It is designed with similar light, colour, and texture. “There’s weird noises,” Seb says. “I told you it’s just coyotes,” Charlie says. “They’re inside the house!” “They can’t get inside the house.” But the house has gaps in the walls which can be clambered into, the kind of which Enid Blyton is fond for her children’s adventures (I reviewed “The Magic Faraway Tree” last month). “There’s something in the walls,” Seb says. The next morning, their way to school is blocked by a band of snarling coyotes. “Guys,” Charlie says, “I know it feels weird to go back to school.” But they must keep going and carry on, guarding the family secrets.
The filmmakers make excellent use of an unfamiliar, tricky, tight little circular shot. When he first appears, the camera orbits Charlie’s hand as he teaches Morse code. It is a play on orientation and perspective. A plane crashes; the camera arcs around the nose of the fuselage. This time the circle is nice and slow. This lets us take in the carnage. An upended two-thousand-year-old sarcophagus stands apart from the wreckage—undamaged. (“It’s a perfect human trafficking cover,” Egyptian detective Dalia Zaki, played by an outstanding May Calamawy, says.) The film closes with the same shot; this time moving anti-clockwise around a door. Sometimes the set tilts so that a floor or window isn’t straight, or a static item appears to be sliding.
Another neat trick is the placement of the camera at child-height. Take a scene where Seb gawks at his fighting parents: the audience watches from his eyes. Scenes upstairs are filmed at door-knob level—we can’t see the whole door—so that by the time the adults start to crawl on the floor the angle seems natural. A hospital scene is shot as if from behind the head of the patient, looking out on the just-pulled-back hospital curtains, to the people being ushered to the bedside, to the open door behind them, to the darkness beyond.
Do all successful horror movies need tip-top lighting design? The Bruce Springsteen song “Blinded by the Light” plays in the background. “The Mummy” blinks in half-light. Net curtains filter what yellow light does stream in from outside. The windows seem too small for their rooms. Only the side of the actor’s face away from the camera is lit. The characters cannot be clearly seen. Many shots of actor Jack Reynor focus on his huge, unblinking eyes. He holds his wife on the sofa while they watch a V.H.S. tape. He is side on; we stare into his pupils—eyes right—as they jerk with panic.
“It’s very important that you fully prepare yourself for what you are about to see,” someone says to the couple. But first that grandfather-clock-shaped sarcophagus must be opened. There must a couple of gleeful archaeologists poking around somewhere. And there must be some humour. “God help us,” one says. Their camera has a lens which looks like a large popcorn bucket knocked on its side. The sound designers amp up the “snap.” It’s an awesome sound, which repeats in a different scene when Charlie jolts down Morse code with a cheap biro. “Being dead is nothing special,” another one says later. But this is a horror movie—coffins have significance. When one of the open-casket variety pops up in a film as good as “The Mummy” we expect something juicy. We aren’t shown the body. Schubert’s “Ave Maria” plays on the stereo. Two pious, gossipy, older women, dressed head-to-toe in black, peer inside. “Embalming fluid is like Botox!” one says.
Adam Poole
20th April 2026
If you are interested in viewing this screening, please book your tickets here
