A parent’s love is supposed to be boundless and unconditional, but you have to snicker the first time that Charlie Cannon (Jack Reynor) and his wife, Larissa (Laia Costa), are reunited with their daughter after a nightmarish eight-year absence. Katie is a mischievous little girl played by Emily Mitchell when she disappears mysteriously from the backyard of the family’s temporary digs in Cairo, where they’ve been living for five months while Charlie works as a foreign correspondent for an American news channel. When Katie comes back into the couple’s life after being discovered inside a very old sarcophagus found on the site of a plane crash, she’s played by Natalie Grace under layers of prosthetics and makeup, and while she’s technically alive, she looks like a none-so-fresh corpse. Her flesh is desiccated and gray, her hands and feet are jagged claws, and her breath comes out in rasps. She’s in a catatonic state from the trauma of whatever she experienced, the doctor claims, but she also has to be kept under heavy sedation to keep her from clawing at her own skin. Despite that, he insists home is the best place for her recovery. When her mother and father gently reach out to caress the stringy wreckage of Katie’s hair, you wait for the girl to whip her head around and sink her teeth into one of their hands.
Naturally, that does eventually happen, but holy hell does it take a long time.
