THE MORTUARY ASSISTANT (2026)

Studio:   Shudder/Dread
Director: Jeremiah Kipp
Writer:   Tracee Beebe, Brian Clarke
Producer: Patrick Ewald, Cole Payne, Jacob P. Heineke
Stars:    Willa Holland, Paul Sparks, John Adams, Keena Ferguson, Mark Steger

Review Score:

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Summary:

An evil entity torments a recovering addict with supernatural experiences during a haunting night inside a mortuary.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

With suspicious solemnity, mortician Raymond Delver supervises Rebecca Owens’s final embalming procedure as an intern at River Fields Mortuary. Upon completing her task, Raymond invites Rebecca, who suffers from sudden headaches that create strange visions, to take over primary work handling dead bodies so he can concentrate on the business side of the mortuary.

A recovering addict, Rebecca attends a twelve-step meeting where she receives her one-year-sober chip from her sponsor, Kelly. In attendance for support, Rebecca’s grandmother tells her that her dead father Ben would be proud of her. Rebecca hallucinates a creepy addict taunting her from the back of the room. Despite a warning from Kelly about relapsing, Rebecca considers buying drugs from a sketchy street dealer after the meeting, but she doesn’t go through with the purchase.

Supposedly unable to do it himself, Raymond calls Rebecca to the mortuary for a night of processing unexpected morgue transfers alone. During the subsequent embalming procedures and cremations, Rebecca experiences various instances of paranormal activity such as reanimating corpses, taunting phone calls, and blood momentarily appearing on her body.

Rebecca inexplicably finds herself back at home instead of in the mortuary. Claiming she received a phone call requesting her to come over because Rebecca relapsed, Kelly arrives at the door. Rebecca suddenly becomes possessed, bites off one of Kelly’s fingers, then stabs her in the head with a corkscrew.

Unable to understand what just happened once she returns to normal, Rebecca calls Raymond for help. After she recounts her evening, Raymond cryptically warns that Rebecca is in danger, as is anyone around her. Raymond instructs Rebecca to immediately return to the mortuary where he will explain everything.

Revealing that she was actually an illusion created by a demonic entity known as The Mimic, Kelly seemingly resurrects. Rebecca hurries outside to find the real Kelly coming to her door. Rebecca ignores Kelly to rush back to the mortuary.

Raymond explains that The Mimic is an entity that will exploit the worst parts of one’s self in order to weaken a living host it wants to possess. Raymond claims he wasn’t sure the demon, which had been tormenting him until he found a way to keep the curse controlled, would bind itself to Rebecca. Now that it has, Raymond warns that The Mimic will torture Rebecca with her secrets until she submits.

Raymond starts giving Rebecca a crash course in how to banish the demon by first finding the symbol representing its name. Raymond’s instructions are interrupted when Rebecca becomes possessed again. Raymond repels Rebecca by baring symbols tattooed on his chest, then he locks himself in his office.

Rebecca’s possession subsides, but she experiences another series of haunting visions that include her grandmother and an attacking corpse. The Mimic also torments Rebecca by having her envision her father Ben attacking her with a scalpel, only for Rebecca to find she’s stabbing herself in reality.

Raymond seemingly calls Rebecca on the phone with instructions to slit her wrist, bleed on a dead body, then cremate the corpse for her nightmarish ordeal to be over. Rebecca does as instructed, but doing so causes her to have a vision of being an injured 14-year-old wheeled on a gurney by Ben and Kelly. When she wakes up, Rebecca finds herself being burned inside the cremation chamber. That vision ends once Rebecca convinces herself it isn’t real.

Rebecca calls Raymond to tell him his instructions didn’t work. Raymond responds that he never called Rebecca, indicating The Mimic tricked her again. Raymond tells Rebecca she needs to watch his videotapes in the basement storeroom to find out what she really needs to do. The Mimic takes over the call once more to try coercing Rebecca into embalming and cremating herself.

A VHS tape shows Raymond recording instructions on how to create a unique embalming agent out of a possessed person’s blood to banish the demon. On the tape, Rebecca sees Raymond apologizing to Vallery, a supposedly possessed woman held captive in a special coffin, before draining her blood to use in the agent.

During her search for the entity’s specific symbol, Rebecca encounters visions of her father, a flooding bathroom that flashes Rebecca back to Ben finding her drowned when she was 14, and Vallery locked in the coffin. Following Raymond’s steps, Rebecca gets another body from the morgue, performs a ritual to supernaturally mark it with the demon’s name, and burns the corpse in the crematorium.

Mistakenly assuming her haunting is now over, Rebecca is knocked out from a push down the stairs by a vision of her father. A flashback shows The Mimic causing Ben to fall and break his neck after rescuing Rebecca from drowning when she was a teen. While unconscious, Rebecca greets her father in the afterlife. Ben tells his daughter she needs to stop reliving his death because that moment only brings her pain.

Rebecca recovers back at the mortuary in the morning. Hearing Vallery’s pleas from downstairs, Rebecca frees her from the coffin. Immediately becoming possessed, Vallery attacks Rebecca until Raymond enters to repel Vallery back into the coffin with his chest tattoos.

Raymond brings Rebecca upstairs for an explanation. Although Rebecca accuses him of holding Vallery against her will, Raymond contends she isn’t really Vallery because she is possessed. With Rebecca wondering openly if Raymond will do the same thing to her, Raymond maintains that Vallery’s blood is an essential ingredient in the agent that prevents the demon from possessing them or killing others. Telling her she will have to learn to face the darkest parts of herself to live a life beyond fear of the entity’s control, Raymond suggests that he and Rebecca could look for another way to combat the demon together.

Rebecca turns away to walk outside. However, upon seeing The Mimic still stalking her from across the street, Rebecca turns around and reenters the mortuary.

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Review:

“The Mortuary Assistant” movie is based on the same-named video game created by Brian Clarke. Having not played the game, I can’t say how well the film works as an adaptation. I can say the film doesn’t work well as a commercial, because if the gameplay is as repetitive as the movie’s rote scares, as unengaging to look at, or as slowed down by long stretches of mundane activities, then I have no desire to reexperience “The Mortuary Assistant” as a game.

Main character Rebecca’s first scene in the film involves her performing an embalming procedure under the watchful eye of her mortician mentor, Raymond. This isn’t where we learn anything substantial about her. That comes next, when Rebecca attends a twelve-step meeting in a room with eggshell-colored walls and beige curtains to match the beige jacket Rebecca wears over a brown sweater. There’s dressing a set and performer to convey a melancholy mood and then there’s just being visually colorless, and “The Mortuary Assistant’s” dull imagery gets bit by the latter.

Being a recovering addict haunted by her father’s death is the one and only thing the movie ever tells us about Rebecca’s wafer-thin characterization. We’re told even less about her boss, although a lot can be inferred from the completely cliched way actor Paul Sparks chooses to portray sullen-faced Raymond. His collared shirt, with only its top button unbuttoned, stays tightly tucked into khaki pants. His head often tilts slightly down so his eyes can look up suspiciously. And he speaks in such an emotionless monotone, he sounds like a robot vaguely attempting to growl out a Shaft impersonation. Creepy guy hiding something. Got it.

Raymond disappears for the middle of the movie so Rebecca can spend the night working alone in the mortuary. Odd things then start happening with escalating eeriness as she embalms and cremates corpses. Lights flicker. Dead bodies twitch. Strange symbols form. Ominous lightning flashes provide punctuation. A parked car’s door mysteriously opens outside. Blood appears and disappears on Rebecca’s body. Haunting voices taunt her over the phone. Inexplicably, Rebecca suddenly finds herself back in her home, spontaneously possessed by a demon into violently attacking a visitor. By this point, “The Mortuary Assistant” hasn’t provided any explanation for any of these events, so it’s simply a series of weird things happening, without any impact that would come with context.

Eventually, which is a word that summarizes many of the movie’s minutes thanks to its roundabout meandering through redundant or unnecessary scenes, Raymond returns for an exposition dump that gives Rebecca some clues about what’s going on. He might give even more clues if he didn’t insist on speaking so cryptically, or if he wasn’t repeatedly interrupted by the evil entity haunting the mortuary. Basically, Raymond drops some MacGuffin mumbo jumbo about blood rituals, demon names, and other hoops Rebecca will have to jump through to survive the night.

Once she knows what to do, more or less, another series of tamely terrifying experiences queues up for Rebecca. Visions of her dead father haunt her. Visions of being killed haunt her. Flashbacks to a traumatic teenage experience haunt her. Eventually, again, Rebecca uncovers some of the secrets behind her ordeal as “The Mortuary Assistant” casually coasts to an underwhelming conclusion.

Other than derivativeness and drabness, venial yet not unpardonable sins, there’s nothing technically “wrong” about how the movie handles itself. That’s the problem. It’s a low-risk, low-reward course in Horror 101, as taught by a student aide at a community college instead of by a tenured professor at a prestigious university. Given a lift by terrific practical effects from Norman Cabrera, a safe approach to basic boos makes “The Mortuary Assistant” passable for formulaic fright fare on a streaming service. If the film tried competing against heavy hitters in the genre though, “The Mortuary Assistant’s” plainness would have it boxing above its lighter weight class.

Review Score: 50

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