Ahmanet Mummy: Who She Is and Who Plays Her

Ahmanet is the title creature of The Mummy (2017), a princess of ancient Egypt who bargained with the god Set and was mummified alive. Sofia Boutella plays her, billed third behind Tom Cruise as Nick Morton and Annabelle Wallis as Jenny Halsey. Alex Kurtzman directed the film, which Universal released in the US on June 9, 2017, as a spinoff on this hub. In the credits she is simply Ahmanet.

The prologue gives her whole origin. Ahmanet expects to inherit the throne until her father has a son, so she makes a deal with Set and kills her family. She is then mummified while still alive and buried in a sealed tomb far from Egypt, which is the film's answer to the common question of whether she was mummified alive.

Who is Princess Ahmanet based on? The film presents her as a fictional princess who loses her place in line for the throne when her father has a son, and it names no real historical figure as her model. The Mummy films are fiction, and every curse in them, hers included, is a screenplay invention. If you want the older versions of the idea, the mummy 1932 and the mummy 1999 both build on the priest Imhotep and a lost love. See imhotep mummy and anck su namun for those two, because Ahmanet is neither of them.

Production shot the film at Shepperton, in central London, in Namibia and around Bordeaux, according to Screen Global Production. It cost $125 million to make and took in $409 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo.

Ahmanet is tied most closely to Nick Morton, and through him to Jenny Halsey, Chris Vail, Henry Jekyll and the god Set. Her bond with Nick starts when he and Chris open her tomb in Iraq. The film then has her mean to use him as the vessel for Set, which is the answer to why Ahmanet chose Nick: in the story's logic he is the man who found her and walked out of the crash alive. Tom Cruise plays Nick opposite Sofia Boutella's creature.

Jenny, played by Annabelle Wallis, is the person Ahmanet drowns, and the one Nick's final choice brings back. Chris, played by Jake Johnson, returns later as a ghostly companion. Jekyll's organization is the only force in the film that treats Ahmanet as a case to be studied and contained. Set, performed by Javier Botet, is the power she bargained with, and the one that Nick takes into himself.

In the wider series, her nearest counterpart is Imhotep, who regenerates by draining life from the people he kills in the mummy 1999. Browse the mummy villains for all of them, or the mummy characters for the heroes.

In my opinion, Ahmanet works best when the film lets her rules show, and four moments do that. The tomb opening in Iraq is the first: air strikes crack open a site where a princess was sealed away, and the scene sets her up as something put under the ground deliberately. It could be argued that this beats the casual reveals in the older films, where a book is simply read aloud.

The plane crash is the set piece that shows her reach. The aircraft goes down once her power takes hold, and Nick walks away unharmed. The morgue wake up is the quieter beat, and I would pick it as the best horror moment in the film, because it turns the chase into a curse that Nick cannot simply outrun.

The army of the dead in London is the loudest, and it echoes Imhotep calling the plagues of Egypt in The Mummy (1999). The final scene, where Nick drains her life force, is the film's clearest statement of its idea: she is stopped by taking her power, not by killing her. That being said, the bargain with Set is the part I would have liked to see more of, since it drives everything that follows.