Not that I know the Irishman, best known for regurgitating horror’s tired tropes with a view to winning the most nauseating gore competition—but I watched his latest film. And no matter how I look at things now, I cannot bring myself to like him. As Layla El-Faouly in the Disney+ miniseries Moon Knight, the Egyptian-Palestinian actor May Calamawy gave a convincing, emotionally potent performance in English.
I have no idea how good her Egyptian Arabic is, but, using my mother tongue in Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, Calamawy’s Detective Dalia Zaki comes across like an English speaker mindlessly parroting sounds she does not understand. In this way Lee Cronin achieves the seemingly impossible task of employing, not a white American but a “real native” to portray what nonetheless amounts to a Hollywood parody of one. This is just as true of Zaki’s nemesis, identified simply as the Magician (the Iraqi-British Hayat Kamille), along with every “Egyptian” character here.
Not only their accents but the intonation, the stress, the pauses, everything about their Arabic is a kind of coded moviespeak that, were it not unintelligible, would be indistinguishable from the rest of the film’s canned dialogue. The words are technically Arabic, but they might as well be Chakobsa: the language David and Jessie Peterson invented for the pseudo-Arab inhabitants of the desert planet Arakis in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films. The only—passing—exception is the man who plays Calamawy’s young colleague at one point; and his lines seem to be dubbed with the help of AI.
In Lee Cronin’s The Mummy, evil is a native sickness that contaminates an otherwise perfect, unsullied child of empire. That is the only reason Egypt is there at all. Otherwise, while they look Egyptian, the body language and mannerism pool the characters draw on makes sure that they move as well as talk American.
From the way the detective munches on a sandwich, standing, while she chats with the aforementioned man to the way the possessed woman crawls, each character feels like a skin for some stock blockbuster type, Calamawy’s intrepid cop and Kamille’s wicked witch being the most obviously pedigreed. But, aside from the fact that it consists of “a bunch of cheesy jolts and a vulgar array of physical assaults, most of them aimed at young girls and old women”, critics seem to agree that this is more of an exorcism than a mummy film. There are wrappings inscribed with incantations that seem to replace the skin of the victim, but no preserved cadaver reanimated.
That’s why the film has been been called “A Laughably Bad Attempt at The Exorcist” and an “Evil Dead follow up in all but name”. But if you happen to be even minimally culturally aware, there is this, arguably graver problem. Cronin’s country is a ludicrous Arabian Nights phantasmagoria of randomly “Eastern” visual cues, black magic, fantasies of Sahara, and strangely sanitized government offices that look like a sendup of Cairo’s notoriously gritty bureacratic spaces.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
