Did you ever want to get into a movie so badly, but it didn’t give you the chance? I never watch a movie with knives at the ready; every film that’s out there, whether it’s the biggest summer blockbuster or a small movie with a shoestring budget and unknown actors, requires an inordinate amount of blood, sweat, and tears from everyone pulling on the same rope, and that’s always to be honored. But sometimes, a film simply doesn’t rise to the occasion, and you’re left holding a mixed bag full of respect for the effort and a disconnect from what you’ve just seen. So went my experience with The Mortuary Assistant.
Based on a 2022 video game, the film is a wandering mess of personal demons, actual demons, and nebulous objectives that never coalesces into something viewers can grab hold of and take with them. Instead, director Jeremiah Kipp wants the movie to grab hold of you and take you with it, but doesn’t give it the right tools to do so. His intention of warping our minds between reality and hallucination is admirable, but without a firm foothold in either realm, The Mortuary Assistant feels like being kidnapped and banged around in the trunk of a car. You can’t see anything beyond your immediate surroundings, and it feels like the driver wants to hit every bump and ditch, but they seem to have an affinity for trying to make your time in the trunk exciting when you just want to either jump up to the front seat to enjoy the ride or get out of the car.
The premise is fairly simple: A mortician tests his assistant by locking her in with corpses and a demon, giving her weird instructions on how to deal with both. I mean, it’s not that bad, aside from the whole “young woman imprisoned against her will and made to do someone else’s dirty work” thing. Screenwriters Tracee Beebe and Brian Clarke (also the game’s creator) amply flesh out the film’s avatar, furnishing her with a solid backstory that helps us root for her. Willa Holland does good work filling her role as Rebecca Owens, a newbie who’s just been thrust into the fight of and for her life. Her circumstance asks her to oscillate between the real and brutal visions of her past, present, and future, and Holland deftly maneuvers Rebecca through fear, strength, and horror as she tries to find her way forward. Both Rebecca and Holland are exactly why The Mortuary Assistant is worth your time; the character is interesting and put through hell, and Holland makes it stick.
When we’re introduced to her, she’s graduating from being mortician Raymond Delver’s (Paul Sparks) apprentice to full-time assistant. Kipp asks Paul Sparks to portray Raymond as an aloof sort—he seems present, but not all the way present. Raymond speaks in short, clipped sentences where a pause is inserted after almost every other word; it’s meant to be off-putting, as if Raymond doesn’t quite know what to do with or say to Rebecca. There’s something else behind his nearly-dead eyes and halting speech pattern—especially when Rebecca sees him coming out of the basement, a place he forbids her to go, particularly because we’re shown that he wasn’t alone down there—but in this first scene, his awkwardness is layered upon weirdness, especially when Rebecca starts suffering a sudden migraine. And it’s made weirder when she starts seeing strange people at her sobriety meeting and dead people rising during a last-second embalming assignment Raymond hands her.
Okay. The popcorn’s hot, stuff’s starting to go sideways, and we’re starting to get the fear that the thing Raymond was checking out in the basement has something to do with what Rebecca’s experiencing. At this point, we want to dig in our heels and get ready for good horror shenanigans, right? Trouble is, this is where The Mortuary Assistant starts to crumble under the weight of its own pretentiousness. Early and often, the script starts toying with our grasp of what’s real and what’s not by giving us red herring after red herring. Bodies in the morgue start reanimating on the table when Rebecca’s not looking, dangling a threat in front of us that gets instantly pulled back to prep us for the scare that Kipp wants to heave on us. Rebecca starts seeing family members, either alive or dead, calling her names and freaking her out. An invisible finger writes “LET ME IN” on a steamed-up mirror, but it’s only for us to see, which prompts the question: Who is the demon toying with—Rebecca or us? These visual gags don’t mean anything for Rebecca; they’re only meant to keep us titillated, and it does nothing to keep the narrative straight.
Sticking to the gameplay mechanics, Raymond locks Rebecca in the mortuary, cryptically saying that it’s for her own good and that she needs to find a way to survive. That’s it, no further instructions, no nothing—just a sort-of “I have to do this, sorry” kind of thing before he leaves. It’s not entirely sinister, but it’s not at all helpful, as she’s being possessed by something Raymond calls “the entity.” We’re talking glowing eyes, freaky strength, growling voice, and a predisposition to use sharp implements in drastic ways. But this possession is inconsistent, coming and going at random before getting dropped altogether toward the middle of the movie, as if the entity got bored with her. More inconsistent are the hallucinations Rebecca’s having, with fresh corpses springing these Evil Dead II-type attacks on her that eventually show her alone with nothing around her. The Mortuary Assistant is full of these rug-pulls, and the film gets tedious after these scares wind up empty and meaningless.
The script tries to weave Rebecca’s guilt from losing her father and her past as an addict into the night’s progression; sadly, like everything else, it’s window dressing. Even though Willa Holland turns in a truly gripping performance, there’s nothing to hang it on, no foundation to help it all make sense. The film tries to make a metaphor for her addiction, insisting that the demon cannot be killed, only kept at bay; it also shifts her addiction onto something else by film’s end, which cements the “once an addict, always an addict” notion. Raymond is just a facilitator, pushing salvation on her through vague tales of demons and complex banishment rites (note that his bizarre speech pattern straightens out when he gets down to business), and he puts her through hell with this test, something he admits to doing with many before her. And when the final twist comes, it arrives with less of a “Wow!” and more of a “… huh.” The Mortuary Assistant is caught in a hell of its own making, and digging our way up to the light proves to be more of an arduous task than it should be.
