A normal night job at River Fields Mortuary for mortuary science graduate Rebecca Owens turns sinister when terrifying supernatural forces invade!
The movie adaptation is based on the fairly popular 2022 FPV procedural video game of the same name from DreadXP.
So Rebecca Owens (Willa Holland) is, like most interns who chose a profession related to mortuary sciences, a woman with a past. She covers up the none-of-your-business wrist scars while she’s working, is haunted by the death of her beloved father and feels massive guilt over her potential involvement in it, and in general is trying very hard to hold it all together, with as little help/interference as possible. Rebecca is a recovering addict, and what her poison of choice was is never quite revealed, but it doesn’t matter, as Rebecca abstains from everything fun, including a celebratory drink after she passes her final embalming assessment under the watchful eyes of her boss, Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks).
We knew Raymond was a nut-job as he started acting funny even during Rebecca’s final assessment, much less when he calls her way late at night for some emergency dealing with bodies. And honestly, it’s entirely unfair of the boss to involve Rebecca in his demonic shenanigans, whether she wanted to help him or not. Doesn’t Rebecca already have enough emotional nonsense to wade through? She shared at a Meeting and talked to her sponsor, Kelly (Keena Ferguson Frasier), even earning her one-year coin that of course got presented in front of everyone, that night. But yes, sometimes accolades trigger massive emotional landslides, and poor Rebecca is no exception. Somehow Rebecca manages to narrowly avoid the trap of falling off the proverbial wagon in celebration, but the boss calling for some late-night work isn’t going to be helpful to Rebecca’s fragile state.
Back to the mortuary we go, only to be met with all sorts of weird goings-on while Rebecca tries very hard to be professional about embalming these three bodies. It really is hard to act as a stoical mortician while your corpses are twitching, calling you names, and in general acting as something other than, y’know, a freaking dead body. It would be perfectly natural for a recovering addict on the verge of a relapse to be freaking out about this weird sh*t happening in the morgue, but then the phone rings, and the boss is making a confession to Rebecca.
The boss, dear misguided Raymond over there, has involved himself in all sorts of dealings with demons, and one particularly nasty one generally referred to as the Mimic (Mark Steger). As you can imagine, once this thing has been bound to Rebecca, it begins taking the form of those that would affect her the most, usually her father (John Adams). The Mimic also delights in taking the form of Rebecca’s sponsor, and even Raymond himself, to spread misinformation and layer as much guilt onto Rebecca as possible, in theory making her more ripe for total possession.
Any game a person or persons want to play, has to have rules, requirements, objectives. There are procedures to follow, guidelines to obey, ingredients to gather, purposes to fulfill, ways to win, and lose. Still, even after being told of demons and rituals and things Rebecca has to do to save herself from the Mimic, little could have prepared her for finding a coffin with a live blood sacrifice and a name – Vallery (Emily Bennett) – in the forbidden morgue basement. And while Rebecca may feel extra massive guilt about taking Vallery’s blood for her own purposes, if Rebecca doesn’t start fighting back in some form or fashion, ain’t no-one getting out of the morgue anyway!
The reveal of what actually happened to Rebecca’s dad had a bit less of an emotional impact than it could have, given that the reveal took place at almost the end of the movie. And dear Raymond’s speech given when he’s trying to convince Rebecca to stay and join him in his eternal quest to keep the demon/s at bay, is considerably less apologetic than it should be, and much more, “this is your life too now, you might as well spend it with me”, which is, frankly, some extra bullsh*t. The makeup effects for the Mimic aren’t bad, but showing the thing in broad daylight after so many poorly-lit morgue jump scares and storm-lightning reveals is kind of anticlimactic somehow. And while the video game at least begins as a procedural and delves plenty into demonic lore, you kind of get the feeling the movie ran out of time and enough space to show every last little detail from the game, resulting in a bit of a muddy overall plotline. It is nice to see Holland back in a role as a lady badass, she was always great as Thea Queen aka Speedy in the CW’s OG show that began a whole phenomenon, Arrow.
The Mortuary Assistant claws its way to streaming on the Shudder channel on March 27th, 2026!
Reviewed by Alicia Glass