Lee Cronin’s The Mummy offers an interesting take on the Egyptology horror genre. It’s perhaps best described as being about two very different families, one American, one Egyptian. We spend most of the film with the American family, the Cannons, who are living in Cairo, and whose life is thrown into chaos when their daughter Katie is abducted. Eight years later, the Cannons have moved back to their home town of Albuquerque, where Charlie (Jack Reynor) is working as a journalist while his wife Larissa (Laia Costa) raises their son Sebastian and (second) daughter Maud, with the help of her own mother Carmen (Veronica Falcon). However, their lives are upended when they are contacted by Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy), a deputy detective at the time that Katie disappeared but now a senior officer, who informs them that their daughter has been found, apparently mummified, but still alive, in a sarcophagus that was recovered from a crashed aircraft. The Cannons bring “Katie” back to their New Mexico home, where she is alternately catatonic and demonic, so it’s only a matter of time before they start to suspect a supernatural explanation is at play.

Throughout this escalating narrative, which moves deftly between America and Egypt, Cronin demonstrates a real aptitude for several types of horror. On the one hand, there’s a hush that pervades the entire film, and that becomes more immersive and hypnotic as it proceeds, while pairing well with some of the more procedural elements, such as a fantastic sequence in which Detective Zaki traces Katie’s last known movements to a nectarine plantation in the Aswan Valley. Yet this overwhelming hush also works as a powerful canvas for moments of intense bodily horror, many of which revolves around communication. In the grossest scene of the film, Larissa clips Katie’s enormous toenails with agonising precision while Charlie pores over fragments of skin that she has “shed.” Upon inspection, this skin contains fragments of hieratic letters, the oldest cursive script of Ancient Egypt. Likewise, the real Katie is only able to communicate by gnashing her teeth in morse code, which Cronin captures in visceral montage, while the showdown sees Detective Zaki sticking two fingers into her bullet-punctured throat to wiggle her voice box back into position so that she can articulate the hieratic words needed to contain the demon that has possessed Katie. This recurring fusion of gore and communication turns bodily abjection into a medium, make it impossible to separate verbal and visual language from our visceral selves.

There is, however, another aspect of the film – the Egyptian family. While the impact of Katie’s mummification mainly involves the American family, the explanation and lore depends upon the Egyptian family, although we only really get to know the matriarch, who is played by Hayat Kamille and credited as The Magician. Nevertheless, this woman has a daughter of her own, Layla Khalil, who was Katie’s best friend in Egypt, and a husband and son that we glimpse briefly in the prologue. Through this family, we learn that the main antagonist is a demon that has been contained since Ancient Egypt by a mummified human body. For the demon to be properly contained, the host has to be alive and preferably a child; there have been 81 hosts over the centuries, making Katie the 82^nd host. The process for transferring the demon from one mummified host to the next involves a macabre ceremony that the Magician (or matriarch) records on home video, allowing Cronin to add a creepy found footage element to his palette of supernatural procedural and body horror.

Of course, the overt message of the film is that the Egyptian matriarch is evil and the American family is good; it’s a happy ending when Charlie sacrifices himself by absorbing the demon back from Katie and Larissa follows up by tracking down the Magician in an Egyptian psychiatric institute and transferring the demon back to her. Yet there’s also a sense in which the Magician is invested with an enormous moral responsibility, since if the demon is unleashed it could have catastrophic global consequences – consequences that the film tacitly equates with irreversible climate change. For while the action moves between Albequerque, Aswan and more distantly Australia, thanks to an Aussie archaeology expert who turns up to offer some sage advice about Egyptology, all of these landscapes are fused into a single desert continuum; most of the film was shot in Spain and its desiccated landscapes all feel like part of the same topography. The sandstorm that accompanies Katie’s initial abduction in Cairo returns as the sandstorm that shrouds the showdown in New Mexico, while Katie’s body is only discovered – and the sarcophagus is only moved in the first place – because its ancient Aswan location is under threat from a flooding project that has been proposed to mitigate the effects of future climate change in the Nile basin.

When you look at the film from that perspective, there’s a more tacit and provocative message here: one that juxtaposes the American ethos, with its reprofuturistic focus on the survival of the individual nuclear family above all else, and the Egyptian ethos, with its more global focus on custodianship for the future. Evil as her actions might be, the Magician at least attempts to preserve a custodial chain for future generations to read the “dark signs” of the demon’s imminent release (whether they be climate change or something else) along with knowledge of the ceremony needed to ensure that the demon’s actions remain contained from the world at large. The Americans are unable to envisage the future in those terms – once they’ve expelled the demon beyond the boundaries of their own nuclear family, they have no interest in continuity or custodianship, despite seeing the catastrophic events that ensue when the demon merely threatens to break free. An uneasy sense remains that disaster is imminent, only a generation or two away, which makes The Mummy feel strangely attuned to a time in which America’s ability to offer resolution, and to guarantee the future, is shrinking to exponentially smaller and smaller timeframes.