Horror Movie Review: The Mortuary Assistant (2026)

How do you know when a film’s is exceptionally convoluted, to the point of irritation? When the finale involves one of the leads explaining what happened and why it matters. No, seriously. That’s how The Mortuary Assistant ends, but I doubt many will make it that far as it’s such a tedious watch.

Directed by Jeremiah Kipp from a screenplay by Tracee Beebe and Brian Clarke, The Mortuary Assistant is based on a video game of the same name. It was developed by DarkStone Digital and published by DreadXP in 2022.

In the game, players take on the role of Rebecca Owens working at a mortuary. Your job is to embalm corpses, dealing with all the mundane tasks that come with it. Except this is a haunted mortuary and a demon wants your soul.

It’s a solid game with a few decent scares, decent puzzles and plenty of creepy atmosphere. Which could make for a solid movie, except, this adaption ends up focusing on the wrong things. Rather than taking the base idea of the game, and making a unique film out of it, it chooses instead to get bogged down in bloated lore that just isn’t that interesting.

Willa Holland stars as Rebecca Owens, a young woman with a past, who has started working at a mortuary run by the mysterious Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks). Quickly, it is established that something is off about this place and her boss, but she’s too preoccupied to notice.

It’s an ok start. Were we meet the characters, establish a story, set things in motion, and experience a ton of foreshadowing. The film has no interest in playing it coy, and audiences are quickly clued into the fact that this mortuary is haunted.

No night shifts for Rebecca? Surprise sucker! It did make laugh that she is called in for a night shift almost immediately after being told she wouldn’t be working them. Cue a lonely, creepy night in a mortuary where lightening crashes every ten seconds. Something that could add atmosphere, but feels so egregious, that it actually comes across silly.

As the night goes on, things start to go bump, and Rebecca doesn’t know how to deal with it. Something made all the worse when the demonic activity starts to target her personally. You see, she has her own demons.

The story isn’t just convoluted; it’s a clumsy mess. Staggering from plot point to plot point like it’s drunk. Slurring about demons, and addiction, and how it’s all just one big metaphor. Dare to suggest it go home and sleep it off, and you’ll be hearing a spit-flecked speech about how it stays ‘true to the game’. Which as we all know, always works well for video game adaptions.

It’s not just the story that makes The Mortuary Assistant such a horrid watch though. Perhaps the biggest sin, outside of being boring, is that it’s not scary at all. Not only are its jump scares half-hearted, but because the lore is deemed so important, there’s no chance of tension ever being built up. Not when every other horror scene is intersected with mind-numbing detail about demons, rituals, Rebecca’s past, and more.

There’s no urgency to anything, no reason to feel like Rebecca is genuinely in peril, and no reason to care about anything going on inside the mortuary. Something not helped by actors who were clearly not prepared to be speaking this much nonsense dialogue. Willa Holland is ok, even if some of her expressions are pretty bad, but Paul Sparks is downright cringeworthy a lot of the time.

Put it all together and what we have is something truly awful. It might be faithful to the game, but that comes at the cost of an entertaining film.