My Thoughts on The Mortuary Assistant
Video game adaptations have a reputation, and not a good one, so will The Mortuary Assistant buck that trend?
It opens promisingly enough, with Willa Holland playing Rebecca Owens, a mortuary assistant, and Paul Sparks is the imposing Raymond Delver, her mentor - or tormentor, depending on how paranoid you are.
Early on we get one or two scenes that work quite well, featuring some nice close up shots and that sense of dread of what is to come, but then the film starts to struggle.
The biggest problem is that it follows the game far too literally, and having played said game, some of these details make sense - you’re supposed to poke around, experiment, and piece together logic - but in a film, it just feels random, which was a complaint I had with Iron Lung.
Some will argue that of course it is going to follow a similar path, but it needs to appeal as a movie as well, and if it doesn't make sense from a movie perspective, maybe it should not be included?
The film features a lot of lore scattered throughout the film in tiny, passing references that never get explained too, and while I suspect they are meant to add depth, but most of the time they just clutter the screen and slow the story down.
The scares also don’t always land, with moments are supposed to be frightening, but the effect is often diluted, with jump scares are treated like a checklist, with very little tension being built, as everything is shoved in front of you, visually loud and quick, which is exhausting more than it is scary.
I didn't mind Paul Sparks, who embodies Delver’s cold, detached nature perfectly, where he’s harsh, occasionally cruel, and entirely believable as someone who could make working in a morgue feel like a form of psychological torture.
Holland also does solid work as Owens, conveying confusion, dread, and occasional panic convincingly, and the practical effects are effective, especially the body horror moments, which are gross in all the right ways.
But it all feels like a slog to get through, with the balance just feeling off throughout, where the filmmakers seem committed to replicating the game faithfully, but what works in an interactive environment doesn’t always work in a movie theater.
Players can explore, experiment, and absorb the world at their own pace, while film audiences are passive, and when too many elements are crammed in without explanation, and the end result feels bloated, and never comes together in a way that’s satisfying or terrifying.
By the middle of the film, it’s clear that the movie could have been a leaner, scarier, smarter adaptation if it had translated game logic into cinematic logic rather than trying to reproduce every interaction literally.
There’s a kind of charm to the effort, but charm doesn’t substitute for pacing or tension, and I didn’t like how frequently the movie overexplains or underexplains at the wrong times, as it tries to serve two masters - the game and the audience, and neither ends up fully satisfied.
The filmmakers had all the right pieces, but they just never quite fit together on screen, and just ends up more cluttered than immersive, and more frustrating than memorable, and for me it shows yet again that unless the story is reshaped for the medium, it risks becoming a product that’s more frustrating than effective.