Crew
Director – Jeremiah Kipp, Screenplay – Tracee Beebe & Brian Clarke, Based on the Videogame The Mortuary Assistant (2022) Created by Brian Clarke, Producers – Patrick Ewald, Jacob P. Heineke & Cole Payne, Photography – Kevin Duggin, Music – Jeffrey Alan Jones, Visual Effects Supervisor – Tarek Saleh, Visual Effects – Cannonball FX, Special Effects Supervisor – Chris Bailey, Makeup Effects – Norman Cabrera Monsters, Production Design – Chelsea Turner. Production Company – Epic Pictures Group/Traverse Media/Creativity Capital.
Cast
Willa Holland (Rebecca Owens), Paul Sparks (Raymond Delver), John Adams (Ben Owens), Keena Ferguson (Kelly), Emily Bennett (Valery), Sydney Haner (Young Rebecca)
Plot
Rebecca Owens graduates as a mortuary assistant at the River Fields mortuary under owner Raymond Delver. Rebecca then experiences a nightmare where she thinks she kills Kelly, her Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor. Raymond urges her to return to the mortuary where she will be safe. He tells her that a demon is trying to possess her. He has been fighting demons and has developed some methods to do so. Struggling against hallucinations created by the demon, Rebecca tries to complete the rituals that Raymond insists she must conduct to free herself.
The Mortuary Assistant (2020) was a horror videogame created by Brian Clarke. In the game, as in the film, the player is mortuary assistant Rebecca Owens who must deal with assorted possessed corpses and demonic forces in the mortuary and complete various rituals to bind and banish them. The film version is directed by Jeremiah Kipp who has made assorted horror films such as Creepers (2014), The Sadist (2015), Black Wake (2018), Theresa & Allison (2019), Slapface (2021) and The Geechee Witch: A Boo Hag Story (2024), plus one of the episodes of the anthology 60 Seconds to Die (2017).
I didn’t know about the film’s videogame pedigree before sitting down to watch The Mortuary Assistant and just assumed it to be a regular horror film. My initial take was that it might end up being a supernatural take on Nightwatch (1994). Or given the focus on Willa Holland’s morgue attendant maybe at a stretch even something of Kissed (1996).
The Mortuary Assistant starts fantastically well. There is a lighting scheme that reduces everything to the point that it almost looks as though it has been shot in monochrome. Jeremiah Kipp carefully establishes the routine of the morgue and the process of treating the bodies. There seems to be something off about morgue director Paul Sparks, especially the hints that he keeps ‘something’ in the perpetually locked cellar. Things get weird when Willia Holland’s AA sponsor Keena Ferguson turns up and Willa abruptly attacks her, her eyes suddenly turned yellow, before Kenna gets up as some type of undead, all before Willa answers the door and the real Keena is standing there unharmed. It is something that suddenly causes the film to leap into a WTF register.
The film gets wilder with Paul Sparks’ insistence that Willa Holland return to the mortuary for her own safety and then the revelation that she is possessed by a demon, whereupon she promptly gets up and throws him across the desk. There is all manner of wild lore introduced – having to spell the name of the demon out on a board using symbols found around the morgue, reagents formed of blood of corpses, the need for Willa to bleed herself onto a corpse and then incinerate the body. Or Willa being attacked by a figure and Paul Sparks appearing and tearing open his shirt to reveal tattooed symbols that have the effect of driving the dead away like a crucifix does a vampire.
This promises that The Mortuary Assistant will be a really interesting film. But this quickly starts to dissipate and the film becomes a blur of reality bending illusions, the dead risen, flashbacks to Willa’s past, the ghost of her father and various instructions about arcane lore. After a time, all of this merges into a sameness. The plot fades off and none of it goes anywhere in particular – just more hallucinations and reality incursions. The film sets up a great backdrop of lore but almost none of the instructions that Willa is given about spilling blood on corpses, spelling the name of the demon and so on actually seems to achieve anything. It is the case of a potentially good film losing the plot literally and fading away into repetition of game set-pieces in the assumption that they equate to a dramatic film.
Trailer here