‘The Mortuary Assistant’ Review: Does It Live Up to the Game?
‘The Mortuary Assistant’ movie is here, and it’s based on one of the scariest video games ever. Does the movie live up to the game? Our review.

‘The Mortuary Assistant’ movie is here, and it’s based on one of the scariest video games ever. Does the movie live up to the game? Our review.

Willa Holland stars as Rebecca Owens, and much like the game, she’s got secrets of her own. Once the possession begins in earnest, reality warps, and she’s thrust into an amalgam of past and present, sins and absolution, and the same tired scares on repeat. She has until morning to learn the demon’s name, replicating key gameplay mechanics, the history of which is, quite literally, brushed off, with one character stating it doesn’t matter how they know what they know about runes and domains of Hell—it simply matters that Holland complete her quest… er, save her soul.

Visually, Kipp and DP Kevin Duggin accomplish a reasonable enough atmosphere—flickering lights, the oppressiveness of an abandoned mortuary at night—though it’s nondescript. Effective, yet familiar. The same goes for Jeffrey Alan Jones’ score. All the right horror cues are hit, though you’ll be challenged to remember it by dawn. Even the game’s trademark entity, known as the Mimic, is rendered as sludge. Mark Steger is under the makeup, though its appearances are regularly irreconcilable with the rest of The Mortuary Assistant’s aesthetic. The Mimic is there because it’s in the games, and that’s it.
Alongside stilted performances, awkward editing, and lore that’s both too shallow and too complicated for its own good, The Mortuary Assistant releases as another sincere yet failed effort to translate video game scares to the silver screen. Fans of the source material will likely find more to enjoy—lots of “Oh, I recognize that” moments—though for general audiences, they’ll likely wonder why everyone was so enamored with the game to begin with.
The Mortuary Assistant is a valiant effort, and I’d certainly love to see filmmakers continue dabbling in adapting different media. The upcoming Neon release, Exit 8, is reportedly very good. So, it’s not an impossible task. It is a uniquely challenging one, however. I’ll just say this. After The Mortuary Assistant ended, I booted up my copy on the Nintendo Switch 2. There were more scares in 15 minutes of play than the movie managed in 90.