It’s no secret that adapting video games into movies has a shockingly low success rate; adapting any medium to another has its own unique difficulties, but there’s something about the interactivity of games that simply does not strictly translate to the movies. Even copying story beats and specific character designs leaves fans flummoxed more often than not. It’s hard to say how fans will respond to The Mortuary Assistant, a new film based on the 2022 horror-puzzle game of the same name. This critic has never endeavored to undertake the task, but watching a gameplay video on YouTube quickly makes clear how the filmmakers have both hewn to and strayed from their source material. Regardless of fidelity to (or lack thereof), this filmed version of The Mortuary Assistant isn’t doing anything to break the curse of underwhelming video game movies.
Directed by Jeremiah Kipp, with a screenplay by Tracee Beebe and the game’s creator, Brian Clarke, the film begins with a lengthy embalming sequence. Rebecca (Willa Holland) is performing her final supervised procedure under the tutelage of Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks). She’s nervous, but he’s a steady, reassuring presence, guiding her through the steps with a calm, professional demeanor. It’s a grotesque series of events, but not without a certain procedural fascination; Rebecca pumps fluids in and flushes fluids out, stitches a mouth shut, and contorts the corpses in various ways to prepare it for its final resting posture. It’s strikingly photographed, reminiscent of 2016’s The Autopsy of Jane Doe, as well as Sam Raimi at his most grotesquely exaggerated.
Her job done, Rebecca goes home for the evening, but not before first stopping at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, where we get our first glimpses of her backstory. She’s a recovering drug addict celebrating one year clean, and has a very supportive sponsor who warns her about the dangers of relapsing. Rebecca assures her that she’s fine, but no sooner has she left the meeting than she’s cruising an old spot and eyeballing a dealer. She speeds off without buying anything, but wakes up in a cold sweat at home. Her sponsor shows up at her door, apoplectic that Rebecca has fallen off the wagon, and Rebecca suddenly attacks and kills the woman. It all happens very suddenly, without warning, and things get even weirder when the dead woman gets up off the ground, still very much alive. Or is she? What exactly is going on here? Unfortunately, the answers to this inquiry aren’t very interesting. In keeping with both the story of the game but also boilerplate trends in modern horror, Rebecca proves unable to trust her own reality while she goes on a dour journey into the heart of her addiction trauma.
Kipp and cinematographer Kevin Duggin do what they can within the limited confines of a two-hander taking place in a single location, but a certain malaise sets in after a while. A phone call from Raymond summons Rebecca back to the funeral home in the middle of the night, where he proceeds to lock her inside and give her the first of several elaborate exposition dumps. As it happens, a demon has latched on to her, and unless she follows certain ritual commands in a certain order to identify which corpse is currently housing the demon, it will eventually take full control of her. And, of course, it will do whatever it can to keep her from exorcising it, including bombarding her with nightmarish visions and vivid hallucinations.
This development admittedly gives the filmmakers full license to create some spooky set pieces, as Rebecca struggles to discern what’s real and what’s just in her head, but the tension is frequently interrupted by more and more information courtesy of Raymond. He’s got his own backstory to match Rebecca’s, but unfortunately neither are very compelling. By the time Rebecca’s long-dead father is absolving her of guilt for his accidental death all those years ago, you might just wish the demon would hurry up and get on with things. That’s not to say there isn’t plenty of talent at play here; everyone is doing what they can to elevate this material, and Holland is notably quite good in a demanding role. But as is so often the case in these situations, Kipp’s film probably should have stayed a computer game. There are certainly exceptions to this video game rule, films that prove their mettle and make the best of the medium marriage, but there’s simply nothing about The Mortuary Assistant that convinces of its desired status as an outlier.
DIRECTOR: Jeremiah Kipp; CAST: Willa Holland, Paul Sparks, Mark Steger, Keena Ferguson Frasier; DISTRIBUTOR: Seismic Releasing/Epic Pictures; IN THEATERS: February 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 31 min.
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