Lee Cronin’s THE MUMMY

*CUT TO THE CHASE*

NOTE: This spoiler was submitted by Jeremy

The film opens in Aswan, Egypt. A family arrives at their house, and the daughter is distressed to see that her pet canary is lying in a puddle of its own blood. The mother, known only as “The Magician” (Hayat Kamille), takes her husband Gamal (Omar El-Saeidi) down below the house to find a sarcophagus containing a mummy. Gamal asks if it has awakened. The creature inside shrieks awake, and the hook used to raise the lid snags into Gamal’s jaw, killing him.

Elsewhere in Cairo, journalist Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) is covering stories in the area along with his pregnant wife Larissa (Laia Costa) and children Katie (Emily Mitchell) and Sebastian (Dean Allen Williams). Katie goes outside where she usually meets with another girl named Layla. The Magician then appears on the other side of the family’s fence and gives Katie a nectarine. A scarab breaks out of the fruit and crawls into Katie’s mouth. Meanwhile, Charlie and Larissa notice that Katie is getting candy from an unknown person. Charlie runs outside to discover Katie is missing. He goes into the streets just as a huge sandstorm breaks out, and he sees The Magician carrying Katie. Charlie is unable to catch up to them before they disappear from his sight.

Charlie and Larissa take their case to the authorities, meeting Detective Dalia Zaki (May Calamawy) and her superior officer, Detective Ismail (Husam Chadat). Charlie overhears Ismail telling Dalia in Egyptian that he suspects they had something to do with Katie’s disappearance and are covering it up. Charlie angrily disputes this and demands help.

Eight years later, the Cannons are back in Albuquerque with a teenage Sebastian (Shylo Molina) and their youngest daughter Maud (Billie Roy), along with Larissa’s mother Carmen (Veronica Falcon). They have avoided traveling after what happened to Katie, and Sebastian is tired of his parents not being able to discuss it.

Somewhere in Egypt, a teen on a bike sees a plane crashing in the woods. Amidst the wreckage and corpses of the pilots is a sarcophagus, the same one The Magician was guarding. Two archaeologists recover the sarcophagus and open it. They discover Katie (Natalie Grace) inside, wrapped in bandages and looking like a corpse. She gasps and screams awake.

While the Cannons are getting food, they get a call from the Embassy to inform them that Katie has been found alive. When they find her at the hospital, they see she is in a catatonic state and only makes light gasping noises. Still, Charlie and Larissa are relieved to be able to bring Katie home. When they bring her home, Carmen prays for Katie but gets heatbutted in the face while Katie convulses.

The Cannons try hard to help Katie readjust. Larissa and Carmen try to clip her long toenails, but when Larissa tries to clip the big toe, a huge strand of skin going up to her leg rips off. Larissa tries to tend to the wound, but Katie begins stabbing herself in the open cut until her mother sedates her. Charlie and Larissa argue over what to do with Katie, as Larissa thinks she can fix her daughter, but Charlie knows there is something severely wrong with Katie and he demands answers.

Charlie finds bindings with scriptures on Katie’s body. He brings them to a professor at a college and learns that the writing on the bindings is meant to keep contained an ancient being known as the Nazarenian. At home, Charlie notices that Katie is making clicking sounds with her teeth, and he realizes she is communicating in Morse code since she learned that in the Girl Scouts before she disappeared. Charlie learns that she is saying “Layla” repeatedly. Charlie gets back in touch with Dalia, who agrees to help him. He goes through letters in the basement of support from when Katie went missing. One of them is from “Layla Khalil”, the girl Katie alluded to in Cairo.

Dalia goes to Aswan and finds the house that contained the sarcophagus. The Magician appears to try and attack her, but Dalia shoots her and incapacitates her. She sees another adult woman who runs toward the edge of a cliff. The woman is an adult Layla (May Elghety), who had her tongue cut out by The Magician (her mother) when she tried to reveal the truth about Katie. Layla gives Dalia a tape with Katie’s name on it.

Back at home, the Nazarenian starts to extend its hold against the rest of the family. It possesses Maud to swear at her teacher, leading Charlie to go get her from school. When Carmen tries to pray for Katie, she bites her grandmother’s hand. The Nazaranian then makes Carmen’s cross necklace wrap around her neck before throwing her out the window. She lands on Charlie’s car just as he arrives, and Carmen is promptly devoured by coyotes.

The family holds a wake for Carmen. The Nazarenian possesses Sebastian to free Katie from her room. Maud rips out the rest of her baby teeth and then takes Carmen’s dentures out, flashing a bloody smile at her parents. Katie eventually comes down and attacks the preacher by biting his ear off and then jumping into the casket, where Carmen’s body spills out in front of a mortified Larissa. Katie then bites into Carmen’s neck and drinks the embalming fluid.

Dalia visits the Cannons with the videotape. It depicts The Magician explaining what the Nazarenian is and how her family has been tasked with keeping it asleep for centuries. The process involves removing the demon from a spent vessel into a fresh body, particularly children since their bodies can last longer. Despite Charlie not wanting to finish the tape, Larissa insists, so they witness the ritual where Katie had the Nazarenian passed into her body.

Katie uses the hypnotized Sebastian to remove more bindings from her skin, allowing the Nazarenian to unleash its full power. It attacks the rest of the family, headbutting Charlie bloody and also forcing a scorpion into Dalia’s throat, which punctures a hole through her neck. Charlie manages to get Katie down while Dalia has to stick her finger in her throat in order to say the incantation for the ritual. Charlie stands over Katie and allows the Nazarenian to transfer into his body.

Katie starts to finally go back to normal. The family keeps Charlie in the sarcophagus, where he taps “I love you” in Morse code. Katie starts to bond with her siblings, while Larissa contacts Dalia (still recovering) and says they need to talk about Charlie.

The Magician is shown to be imprisoned in a cell. Larissa shows up and forcefully jabs her with a sedative, then says she knows the woman recognizes her face and whose mother she is. Dalia wheels in the possessed Charlie, and they proceed to re-enact the ritual so that The Magician may become the Nazarenian’s permanent host.

Katie Cannon is kidnapped from her family in Cairo. Eight years later, her parents Charlie and Larissa are told that Katie was found alive inside a sarcophagus. She remains catatonic and possessed. Through bindings on her skin written with scriptures, Charlie learns that Katie is possessed by an ancient evil demon called The Nazarenian, who is kept bound inside the sarcophagus within a human vessel.

The possessed Katie kills her grandmother Carmen and soon possesses her younger siblings Sebastian and Maud. Charlie and Larissa are aided by Detective Dalia Zaki, who found and arrested the woman that kidnapped and infected Katie, known only as "The Magician". The woman's daughter, Layla, gives Dalia a tape that shows how the ritual to transfer the Nazarenian into Katie occurred.

Katie gets Sebastian to remove more bindings from her skin, allowing the Nazarenian to unleash its full power. Dalia helps Charlie and Larissa keep Katie down so they can recite the incantation to transfer the Nazarenian from Katie into Charlie's body. Katie starts to return to normal, and Larissa and Dalia bring the possessed Charlie to The Magician's cell so that the Nazarenian will now inhabit her body.