The Mortuary Assistant, 2026.
Directed by Jeremiah Kipp.
Starring Willa Holland, Paul Sparks, John Adams, Keena Ferguson Frasier, Mark Steger, and Emily Bennett.
SYNOPSIS:
Rebecca Owens, a mortuary science graduate, takes a night job at River Fields Mortuary but what begins as a routine job soon turns sinister as she faces terrifying supernatural forces.
Rebecca Owens (Willa Holland) is a young woman training to be a mortuary assistant and is coming to the end of her training under her boss, Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks), who is acting very peculiarly and restricts Rebecca from going into certain rooms.
However, one night Delver phones her up and asks her to work the night shift, which he has so far forbidden her to do, because there are several bodies that need attention. Upon arriving to do her shift, Rebecca is instructed by Delver to embalm the cadavers before burning them in the furnace, which she thinks is odd. It turns out that Rebecca has been locked inside the building by Delver, who informs her that she is possessed by a demon, and she begins to have visions of her troubled past, visions that mingle with her current predicament. Can Rebecca survive her ordeal and discover the truth about what is happening to her?
Based on the video game of the same name, The Mortuary Assistant is a dark and atmospheric psychological horror that is clearly trying to take the gaming experience and recreate it in the movie format, but as history has dictated more often than not, successful video games do not necessarily make great movies, and The Mortuary Assistant is the latest to join that exclusive club.
There are positives here, such as the brilliant practical effects which mainly centre around bodies being carved up and drained of blood, and the movie does feature probably the most authentic autopsy scenes since Saw IV. The brooding atmosphere that permeates every scene feels very ominous, which is what drives the video game narrative and it is recreated here very convincingly, and Willa Holland is fantastic as Rebecca, giving off strong final girl vibes throughout and making you feel for her plight, especially when you discover her past and how much she is mentally tortured because of it.
But none of this is enough to carry the movie for its 91-minute runtime, especially if you are not familiar with the game and the lore that it set up, because 91 minutes of slow-burning atmosphere is not really the best way to bring new audiences up to speed, and The Mortuary Assistant – co-written by game creator Brian Clarke – assumes you are not familiar with the source material and leans heavily on what gamers would already know. So whilst you are trying to follow Rebecca and why what is happening to her is happening, the movie just keeps piling on the flashbacks, the possessed corpses (white eyes and rictus grins – yes, we get it) and everything else that takes away from anything really scary surprising you. There is a monster central to it all, and the initial appearance of it is quite creepy, but the camera lingers far too long on it that by the end it comes across as quite comical, plus by that point you’re really none the wiser as to how or why it exists.
Somewhere inside The Mortuary Assistant there is a much better movie trying to get out, but in trying to recreate the immersive nature of the game and throw in the extensive lore that Brian Clarke created it loses quite a lot in translation to the screen. It is very bleak throughout, with very little light to balance the darkness – in both tone and visuals – and although Willa Holland delivers a performance worthy of a horror franchise movie survivor you’d want to follow, Paul Sparks is flat and devoid of any charisma for what his character has to do and by the time the final reveals come around and the movie starts to wrap up any tension or sense of dread has long disappeared and any questions you may have had about Rebecca’s loyalty to Delver don’t really matter enough to warrant going through it all again.
Fans of the game may get something out of it but to anyone not already familiar with it, watching somebody playing The Mortuary Assistant is probably more rewarding than sitting through the movie.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Chris Ward
