Synopsis:
During her first overnight shift at the morgue, newly hired mortician Rebecca Owens falls victim to possession from a demonic entity.
Ah, a morgue. You would think a place where one could find a lot of dead bodies in various stages of preparedness for proper viewing or cremation would be the backdrop of more horror movies, but it’s surprisingly underutilized.
The Mortuary Assistant is based on an indie video game by the same name, created by Brian Clarke. The movie is directed by Jeremiah Kipp and stars Willa Holland (Arrow, Legion, Straw Dogs) and Paul Sparks (House of Cards, Boardwalk Empire). Kipp is a familiar name on this publication and after much insistence from me (Read, begging), helming this review was given to yours truly.
The movie jumps right in with unsettling scenes of how the dead are prepared for funerals, twitching corpses, and distant shots of a demon scuttling around on all fours. The movie really explores aspects of the funerary profession that aren’t usually brought to light, like riveting and wiring the mouth shut so they don’t pop open during viewings, which I personally greatly appreciated. More than that, though, there is a very poignant metaphor for addiction and trauma on a subcutaneous level that I really resonated with.
At first, I was hesitant about accepting the movie’s more paranormal aspects immediately, and my initial impression was that it felt rushed and could have done better at building tension. That, however, was totally wiped from my mind with a particularly visceral scene between Rebecca and her sponsor. I felt that it addressed a very real fear in the lives of addicts and, by the end of the sequence, made me feel like I’d been hit by a truck—it did very well to show what the actual horror of the movie would be.
The Mortuary Assistant pays a great amount of homage to its video game source material, between the creature design and storyline, but with one notable but appreciated difference. The video game, as video games are prone to do, mostly carries itself through jump scares. The film, instead, utilises more drawn-out scares and doesn’t fill the screen or get up in the audience’s face with frightening imagery. I suppose that is to be expected; video games want you to react, so they startle you; movies want to make you feel so they give you time to parse what you’re seeing. This is absolutely a point in its favour. I think jump scares are a very weak technique when applied to movies, and I’ve been pleased to see this being moved away from in general.
The movie, unfortunately, hits a slog past the hour mark, where more video game-centric aspects come into play. What would be an engaging puzzle in a video game becomes a dragging sequence of Rebecca wandering the halls and confronting pieces of her traumatic past that have, by this point, become somewhat oversaturated. It’s not for me to decide how this could have been remedied, but it is something to look out for while watching.
Despite that, the movie—more than being an overall enjoyable and body-horror watch—has a good amount of rewatchability to it. Letting you catch pieces of early exposition that you may have missed at first brush.
In short, The Mortuary Assistant is a pretty good movie. If you’re hoping for a movie that does the game justice, you’re definitely getting your money’s worth. Also, if you’re only interested in a good adaptation, you’re in for a decent body-horror and a mind-bending show. If you, like me, have a love for the profession and the demonic, you’re in for a treat. Give it a try once it hits Shudder in March.
