‘The Mortuary Assistant’ Review: Does It Live Up to the Game?
Video games don’t work as movies. For decades, fans of both mediums have been questioning why their favorite titles don’t translate well to the big screen. Is it because of fidelity? The lack thereof? No, not really. At their core, video games are interactive experiences. Gameplay, and the subsequent immersion, are key to their success, especially when it comes to horror games. Participation augments the scares, and when an audience is reduced to passive observers, you might reasonably wonder what was so scary in the first place. Painful as it is to concede, Jeremiah Kipp’s The Mortuary Assistant, adapted from the acclaimed game of the same name, isn’t going to change many minds.
It had been years since I played the game, though I could still viscerally recall the jumps and jolts. In the game, players assume control of Rebecca Owens, a new worker at the River Fields Mortuary. One evening, she discovers the presence of a demonic entity in the mortuary, and after it attaches itself to her, she must endeavor to save her soul before the sun rises. Resultantly, players are tasked with some procedural gameplay and icky mortuary stuff. Three bodies need to be embalmed, and the demon’s name must be learned before the sun rises.
It’s meant to be played on repeat, with each shift adding new scares and scenarios. It’s claustrophobic, austere, and scream-out-loud-scary. As a movie, it’s just repetitious, barely better than last year’s Until Dawn. Heaps of fun to play, considerably less fun to watch. The Mortuary Assistant opts for fidelity, often to its detriment. It’s a barrage of easter eggs and iconography that fans of the game will know (not unlike Five Nights at Freddy’s), though the winks come at the expense of genuine terror.
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.
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The Mortuary Assistant
Summary
The Mortuary Assistant is yet another video game adaptation that dulls the source material’s terror and ingenuity.
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