Recovering drug addict Rebecca Owens finishes her training as a mortuary assistant with praise from her tutor, the owner of the River Fields Mortuary. On her first solo assignment, a late-night double embalming, Rebecca finds it unusual she must embalm as well as incinerate the corpses. The bizarre aspects of the night don’t stop there as the corpses seemingly move in what seems to be very real and frightening hallucinations after she wakes up in her apartment bed. Her employer, Raymond, owner of the River Fields Mortuary, ensures her what she’s experienced and the visions are very real as a demon possesses the mortuary, easily inhabiting the lifeless bodies but trying to permanently attach itself to one of the livings. Having been targeted himself, Raymond’s been able to avoid possession by way of ritual but can’t fully banish the demon without Rebecca’s assistant with a reagent formula he must obtain from living people caught in the middle. As Rebecca returns to the mortuary to try to unlatch herself from the demon’s grasp, she must attempt to capture the demon in a corpse by using her own ritualized-infused blood and then incinerate the corpse to ashes, but the demon won’t go down without a fight.
Based on the 2022 popular horror role-playing game of the same title that was developed by Brian Clarke of DarkStone Digital and published by DreadXP, the video game department of the horror network and news outlet Dread Central, “The Mortuary Assistant” 2026 film adaptation brings virtual mortician madness to the big screen with all its demonic appurtenances with Clark penning the script alongside co-writer Tracee Beeb and “Slapface” director, Jeremiah Kipp, calling the shots. The Dread presented movie is released under Dread’s parent company, Epic Pictures Group, since they already own the rights to the video game and attempt to bring the creepy mortuary atmospherics and terrifying twitching corpses from the first-person perspective game to a third person perspective film narrative. Creative Capital and regular Dread co-production collaborator, Traverse Media, serve as production studios with Patrick Ewald, Jake Heineke, and Cole Payne in the producer role.
The video game characters, Rebecca and Raymond, and you can also through in the demon too, transition to the film with Willa Holland (“Straw Dogs,” “Legion”) as the green Rebecca Owens alone on her first shift, getting her hands dirty with the insides of corpses and dodging demonic aggressions with half-baked rituals and spells by her mortician employer/demon fighter Raymond, played by Paul Sparks (“Headspace”). Sparks carries himself plainly through what should be a more interesting, puzzling peculiar as a deadpan mortician business owner with a rich background in demonology and a two-bit exorcist. Instead, rooting for spark in Sparks’ performance can extinguishable hope for Willa Holland who has to carry much of the fanaticism and strength, as well as fear, as a woman battling demons metaphorically and literally, or perhaps literally battling her demons in an off-the-wagon experience that it becomes metaphorical in her own warped mind. Either way, the game and it’s characters translate to screen one way or another, supported by pawn characters the demon exploits to gain advantage over Rebecca, such as her grandmother (Shelly Gibson) and her drug addict anonymous sponsor (Keena Ferguson Fraiser), to take powerful, matriarchal and influential people in her life, ones who guide a vulnerable woman, and distort them into traps and hellish visions to break down the young mortician’s self-assurance and ability to tell what’s real or not. “The Mortuary Assistant” rounds out the cast with John Adams, Emily Bennett, Elisa Marti, Mark Steger, Sydney Haner, Brian Clarke, Gabrielle Mathews, Adam Woolley, and Michael W. Crowley.
Having never played the video game, which is widely available on multiple consoles and platforms, such as PlayStation 4 and 5, XBOX One and Series X/S, Windows PC, and Nintendo Switch, the movie has all the hallmarks of what makes people’s fears tick: that innate fear of mortality of your corpse lying motionless on a cold, sterile table, environmental atmospherics of a stormy, dark night, demonic mischief that puppeteers and malevolently toys, paganistic folklore and ritual, the lack of hope, religion, and God, dark shadows and slithers of steely lighting, and an overall sense of cynical dread. Yet, somehow, “The Mortuary Assistant,” the movie, feels terribly clunky after a satisfying disturbing creepy setup that includes the ghastliness of mortician embalming process. The story’s second half, and more definitively in its third act, loses traction and falls to pieces in it’s trying to explain too much with too little information of the game’s evolving plotline. The game works well because of it’s lingering through the narrative, letting fear settle in before unleashing bit-by-bit it’s unearthing of secrets. The film adaptation rushes through climatic guts to make possible the many several hours’ worth of game endings to be comprehendible in under an hour and half. Aside from the cliff fall finale, the atmospherics are palpable and the blood and gore, mostly perforating of corpses with a cannula and some of their exposed viscera, has sticky-icky and fleshy texture.
The Shudder Original presentation comes to UK Blu-ray from Acorn Media International. The AVC encoded, 1080p hi-def resolution, BD25 is on the smaller side of disc capacity for decoding and with an array of textures – from clammy skin of a corpse to the burnt amber of blood – “The Mortuary Assistant” Blu-ray teeters the meticulous detai line as if it wants to show you all the glossy and gooey innards but can’t quite flesh them out. No issues with decoding albeit some negative spaces do seem lightly washed and not fully inky to create the possibility of the unknown within the blackness. The Blu-ray has a 2.35:1 aspect ratio presentation to take the smaller confines of a quaint mortuary and have them seem more imposing and closeups a made to be like the surface of alien planets when covering cold corpses, really blowing up the image in greater, better detail. The English DTS-HD 5.1 Master Audio provides crystal clear composition of layers with unobstructed and robust dialogue that can reproduce the resonating monotone of Paul Sparks, an eclectic layering of sounds between the storming elements of non-diegetic weather to the transfixing squishiness and cannula friction of the embalming process that can get under your skin, pun intended. The soundtrack by Jeffrey Alan Jones, who did ADR mixing on “Obsession” as well as compose scores for many indie horrors over the last two decades, is a bit lackluster and doesn’t become its own distinctive character within its pedestrian horror tones. English SDH and French subtitles are available for selection. Special features only include a behind-the-scenes featurette on the static menu that goes briefly into the game and the making of the film. The physical Blu-ray Amaray comes standard with monochrome sleeve art that’s blue and black and barely definable. There are no other tangible elements in the exterior and interior of the release. The UK certified 18 release has strong injury detail and has a runtime of 91 minutes in its region B playback only.
Last Rites: “The Mortuary Assistant” is one of those videogame adaptations that probably should have stayed as a videogame. Plenty of atmospheric tropes to make it haunting and spooky, but too many core story elements and not enough cohesive tape to make “The Mortuary Assistant” work.
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