The Mortuary Assistant (2026) Movie Review: A Video Game Adaptation That Loses the Interactive Terror in Translation

Jeremiah Kipp's The Mortuary Assistant arrives as yet another attempt to translate interactive horror into cinematic experience, adapting Brian Clarke's 2022 viral video game that terrified streamers and players through its randomized scares and multiple endings. Released on Shudder and in limited theaters on February 13, 2026, this 91-minute horror film follows Rebecca Owens, a newly certified mortician who discovers the River Fields Mortuary harbors demonic forces during her night shift. Produced by Creativity Capital, Dread, and DreadXP, the film reunites Kipp with writer Tracee Beebe while bringing Clarke himself aboard as co-writer and executive producer. The cast features Willa Holland as Rebecca, Paul Sparks as her enigmatic mentor Raymond Delver, and Mark Steger as The Mimic, the demon's physical manifestation.

This adaptation faces the considerable challenge of translating what made the game successful: the pressure-cooker tension of performing meticulous embalming procedures while demonic activity escalates, the player's agency in determining outcomes, and the customizable fear meter that allowed individual control over scare intensity. Kipp, whose previous work Slapface demonstrated his ability to explore trauma through genre frameworks, seemed well-positioned to capture the game's blend of psychological and supernatural horror. Unfortunately, The Mortuary Assistant stumbles in its execution, delivering impressive practical effects and committed performances while failing to generate genuine scares or sustain the atmospheric dread that defined its source material.

Story and Screenplay: Lore-Heavy Exposition Drowns Atmospheric Potential

Clarke and Beebe's screenplay attempts to streamline the game's loop-driven narrative into conventional horror film structure, focusing on a single night shift rather than the multiple cycles players experience. The story opens with Rebecca completing her internship under Raymond's supervision, establishing her meticulous approach to embalming while hinting at the mortuary's sinister undercurrents. The script front-loads exposition about Rebecca's troubled past: her struggles with addiction, the death of her father Ben, and her attempts at sobriety through AA meetings. When demonic possession begins affecting her almost immediately, Rebecca must navigate the mortuary's rituals while Raymond guides her remotely through identifying and exorcising the entity.

The screenplay's most significant problem is pacing and information management. Rather than allowing mystery and dread to build organically, the script rushes to explain the rules governing demonic possession, embalming protocols, and the mortuary's dark history. Raymond repeatedly tells Rebecca she must figure things out herself before finally just explaining everything, creating frustrating redundancy. The film drowns viewers in lore within its tight 91-minute runtime, cramming in backstory through flashbacks that interrupt momentum. This becomes overwhelming rather than illuminating, particularly for audiences unfamiliar with the game who need more gradual introduction to these concepts.

The script makes curious narrative choices that diminish emotional impact. Rebecca's mother, whose overdose death triggered Rebecca's own addiction in the game, receives no mention here, weakening the full-circle tragedy of the character arc. The connection between Rebecca and Raymond as former teacher and student gets eliminated, making their relationship feel less substantial and undermining later revelations about his past. The screenplay incorporates elements from multiple game endings, including the emotional closure ending with Rebecca's father, but these moments land with muted impact due to insufficient buildup. The film's structure feels scattershot, with scenes happening without connective tissue rather than flowing naturally from one to the next, creating a disjointed viewing experience where demonic encounters become repetitive interruptions rather than escalating terror.

Acting and Characters: Holland's Commitment Can't Overcome Flat Material

Willa Holland delivers the film's strongest element, bringing nuance and emotional depth to Rebecca that the script doesn't always earn. She captures the character's internal conflict between professional dedication and personal demons, investing scenes with subtle vulnerability that makes Rebecca's predicament compelling even when the horror elements fail to register. Holland excels at conveying the small details: the ticks and fidgets of someone maintaining sobriety, the weariness of someone processing trauma, the determination to prove herself professionally. During embalming sequences, she makes Rebecca's methodical approach credible through focused physicality. Her performance provides the film's emotional anchor, giving audiences someone to root for despite the narrative's shortcomings.

Paul Sparks struggles with a role that requires him to be simultaneously mentor and mystery, but the script doesn't give him sufficient material to work with. Raymond needs to feel enigmatic and potentially threatening while maintaining enough humanity that Rebecca trusts him, but Sparks's performance comes across as robotic and stilted, delivering exposition with little emotional variation. The character exists primarily as a rule-giver and info-dumper, stuck with multiple "let me explain" scenes that should have been warning signs during script development. Without the established teacher-student relationship from the game, Raymond feels like a stranger, making it unclear why Rebecca places so much faith in his instructions.

Mark Steger's physical performance as The Mimic demonstrates impressive commitment, bringing the grotesque entity to life through unsettling movement and presence. The practical effects and prosthetics creating The Mimic's appearance are genuinely striking, capturing the game's visual design faithfully. However, the character appears too frequently, dulling its impact through overexposure. The supporting cast, including Shelly Gibson as Rebecca's grandmother and Keena Ferguson Frasier as her friend Kelly, provide adequate work in limited roles that serve primarily as trauma triggers rather than fully developed characters. The ensemble suffers from a screenplay that treats most people in Rebecca's life as plot functions rather than human beings, making emotional beats feel manufactured rather than earned.

Direction and Technical Aspects: Impressive Craft Undermined by Ineffective Scares

Jeremiah Kipp demonstrates solid technical command without developing a distinctive visual identity for the material. His direction shows understanding of how to frame horror, using the rule of thirds effectively to create dynamic tension and scanning compositions that keep viewers searching backgrounds for lurking entities. He wisely emphasizes practical effects over digital trickery, making the embalming sequences genuinely uncomfortable through realistic depiction of the procedures. The makeup effects bringing both corpses and The Mimic to life are pitch-perfect recreations of the game's imagery, with skin stapling, blood drainage, and organ removal rendered with squirm-inducing detail.

Cinematographer Kevin Duggin captures the mortuary with atmospheric low-light photography that emphasizes shadows and negative space, though some nighttime sequences become muddy and difficult to parse visually. Production designer Chelsea Turner deserves credit for faithfully recreating the River Fields Mortuary's layout, from its gaudy reception area to the sickeningly vacant morgue room. The set design achieves impressive fidelity to the game's geography, making the location feel authentic and familiar to players. However, Kipp never exploits this claustrophobic setting to build sustained tension. Despite dialogue pointing out the mortuary's open layout meant to emphasize Rebecca's vulnerability, the film never lingers long enough to establish spatial geography or let the environment become oppressive.

The editing proves particularly problematic, creating choppy transitions that rob scenes of cohesion. Sequences don't flow organically; they simply happen, jumping from one moment to the next without clear logic. This creates jarring tonal shifts and makes it difficult to track Rebecca's emotional journey or understand temporal progression. When the film attempts scares, whether jump scares, demonic apparitions, or possession sequences, they land with surprising flatness. Kipp never holds on images long enough to let dread accumulate, instead cutting away just when tension should peak. The horror feels repetitive and predictable, relying on conventional tactics that telegraph their arrival. A bathroom flooding sequence feels transplanted from an entirely different film, bearing no stylistic or thematic connection to surrounding material. The result is a horror movie that looks professionally made but generates virtually no actual fear.

Trailer The Mortuary Assistant (2026)

Music and Atmosphere: Strong Audio Design Can't Compensate for Missing Dread

Jeffery Alan Jones's original score works effectively during quieter moments, providing melancholic underscore that enhances Rebecca's emotional scenes without overwhelming them. The music supports rather than dominates, understanding when to recede and let silence create unease. TC Spriggs's sound design during embalming sequences deserves particular praise, creating visceral audio textures through slurping, snipping, and mechanical sounds that make procedures uncomfortably tactile. These moments generate more genuine discomfort than any of the supernatural scares, proving that grounded horror can be more effective than overt demonic activity.

However, the film never establishes the suffocating atmosphere that made the game so effective. The mortuary should feel like a tomb intent on snuffing out Rebecca's life, a place where arriving means never truly leaving. Instead, it registers as merely dark and damp, a normal workspace rather than a supernatural prison. The sound design occasionally achieves institutional hollowness, but these moments remain isolated rather than pervasive. The overall mood aims for slow-burn dread but achieves only tedium, with the heavy-handed addiction-as-possession metaphor becoming increasingly obvious. When demonic entities appear, they elicit no visceral reaction despite looking appropriately grotesque. The film operates at a sluggish pace that mistakes slowness for atmospheric buildup, resulting in a viewing experience more likely to induce sleep than terror.

Strengths and Weaknesses

What Works Well:

• Willa Holland delivers a committed, nuanced performance that provides emotional depth and makes Rebecca a compelling protagonist worth rooting for.
• The practical effects work is excellent, with realistic corpse makeup and embalming procedures creating genuine discomfort through tactile detail.
• Production design faithfully recreates the game's River Fields Mortuary with impressive attention to layout and atmospheric detail.
• The Mimic's practical effects and prosthetics capture the game's visual design effectively, creating a genuinely grotesque entity.
• Sound design during embalming sequences creates visceral audio textures that enhance the uncomfortable medical procedures.
• The film stays relatively faithful to the game's core story while attempting to expand Rebecca's character development and backstory.

What Doesn't Work:

• The film completely fails to generate scares, with flat horror sequences that never build tension or create genuine fear.
• Choppy editing creates disjointed narrative flow where scenes happen without connective tissue or clear temporal logic.
• The screenplay drowns the tight runtime in lore exposition, overwhelming viewers rather than building mystery organically.
• Paul Sparks delivers a robotic performance as Raymond, stuck with repetitive exposition scenes that feel dramatically inert.
• The pacing front-loads horror elements too quickly before settling into monotonous repetition that dulls any accumulated dread.
• Key character connections from the game get eliminated, weakening emotional stakes and making relationships feel underdeveloped.
• The Mimic appears too frequently, diminishing its impact through overexposure when sparing use would have been more effective.
• The film never establishes the claustrophobic atmosphere or spatial geography necessary to make the mortuary feel genuinely threatening.

Final Verdict: A Technically Competent Adaptation That Forgets to Be Scary

Rating: 2.5/5 stars

The Mortuary Assistant earns 2.5 out of 5 stars for being a professionally made but fundamentally ineffective horror film that demonstrates the ongoing challenges of adapting interactive media. The rating reflects a production with strong technical elements, committed lead performance, and faithful recreation of source material undermined by inability to translate the game's essential quality: fear. Kipp shows he can direct horror competently from a craft perspective, staging scenes clearly and working with talented effects artists. The problem isn't technical incompetence but rather failure to understand what made the game work beyond surface aesthetics. By removing player agency, customizable scares, and the pressure of performing tasks while terror escalates, the adaptation loses the core experience that made players love the original.

This film will appeal primarily to fans of the video game who want to see faithful visual recreations of River Fields Mortuary and The Mimic brought to life through practical effects. Those who appreciate Willa Holland's work will find her performance worth watching even when surrounding material disappoints. Viewers drawn to medical horror and uncomfortable procedural detail will appreciate the embalming sequences' visceral realism. The film also works for audiences with high tolerance for exposition-heavy horror that prioritizes lore over scares, or those interested in how video game adaptations navigate the translation process regardless of success. Horror completists checking out every theatrical release may find enough competent craftsmanship to justify a viewing despite the lack of genuine frights.

Conversely, audiences seeking actual scares should look elsewhere, as the film generates virtually no fear despite being ostensibly a horror movie. Those who value atmospheric dread and slow-burn tension will be frustrated by the rushed pacing and inability to sustain mood. Viewers wanting tight, focused narratives will find the lore-heavy exposition overwhelming and the choppy editing disorienting. Anyone unfamiliar with the game may wonder what warranted adaptation in the first place, as the generic possession story offers nothing distinctive beyond production design. The film joins the unfortunately large category of video game adaptations that demonstrate fidelity to source material without understanding what made it special. The Mortuary Assistant serves as reminder that capturing visual details isn't enough when the medium's core appeal lies in interactivity and player-driven tension. It's a horror film that forgot to be horrifying, leaving viewers with competent but lifeless experience that makes revisiting the game a far more rewarding option.