Movie Review – ‘The Mortuary Assistant’ has all of the tense anticipation of evaporating formaldehyde

If you ever wondered what it would be like to watch your great-aunt’s slideshow of family reunions while her collection of dead-eyed porcelain dolls filed out to raid the fridge, congratulations, The Mortuary Assistant (2026) has arrived to fulfill that exact nightmare. What promised to be a brooding descent into morgue-bound madness instead delivers something more akin to lethargic procedural television with a sprinkle of jump-scare confetti and a lot of awkward staring. Directed by Jeremiah Kipp, this adaptation of the 2022 horror game by DarkStone Digital, feels less like a cinematic descent into the morbid unknown and more like an extended staff-training video cut with occasional stingers.

For those uninitiated, The Mortuary Assistant attempts to bring to life the 2022 indie horror game released by DreadXP, a tense, atmospheric experience. In the game, there’s an uneasy tightrope between the mundane and the macabre: drain fluids, suture wounds, keep demons at bay. There’s dread. There’s a rhythm. There’s a method to the madness. The setup should have been gold: newly certified mortician Rebecca Owens (Willa Holland), takes a night shift at River Fields Mortuary, embalming corpses and hoping nothing supernatural decides to ruin her Wednesday. Her mentor, the inscrutable Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks), should be a fount of unsettling knowledge, but instead mostly stares out the window, looking vaguely ominous. It plays like a PowerPoint presentation you fast-forward through.

The movie? There’s a plot. Somewhere. Think of it as the cinematic equivalent of being trapped in a hospital waiting room with a stale bag of chips and five strangers who keep offering you unsolicited advice about distilled water. The original game plunged players elbow-deep into a hands-on horror experience: identify possessed corpses, perform rituals, and battle demons in intimate, tension-laden first-person gameplay. In theory, that gripping mix of the mundane and the macabre should translate well to the screen. In practice, this film’s script by Tracee Beebe and game creator Brian Clarke often feels like it’s afraid of its own haunted shadow.

Let’s talk atmosphere: the mortuary setting should be a character in itself: dank, cold, and full of secrets. Instead, it’s presented like a leftover set from a daytime drama with the lights unscrewed. The embalming scenes, the very heart of the game’s eerie allure, are like an assembly line reduced to graphic, if perfunctory shots that leave the audience longing for something (okay, anything) with actual grit. In attempting to adapt the game, The Mortuary Assistant cuts out everything that made the source material compelling and replaces it with vacant solemnity. It’s horror by numbers, by rote, by someone who looked at the essence of the game and thought: “Nope. Let’s do paperwork instead.” Where the game’s slow build actually builds tension, Jeremiah Kipp’s tortured pacing drags the running time of 91 minutes over every filthy tile in the prep room. Scenes meant to unsettle are administered with the emotional investment of a bored sexton laying sod. What dialogue there is snaps like soggy string and Rebecca reacts to “horrors” with the enthusiasm of commuters on a delayed subway.

The supernatural elements are deficient in every way that matters, barely bubbling beneath the surface until the final reveal, and even then, it’s a limp towards the credits. The scares are predictable, recycled from every horror textbook cliché ever printed, and delivered like strung together cut scenes from a video game where every character, but especially Player One, is an NPC.

Kipp, a director who’s delivered competent genre films before, like Slapface (2018) and Black Wake (2018), seems shackled to a vision that prioritizes dreary reverence over fear. The overall setting, potentially dripping with dread, becomes indistinguishable from any other dimly lit indie horror set. The tension, which in the game is a creeping itch under the skin, here is more like a mild mosquito bite that never gets scratched.

Adaptations walk a tightrope: honor the source, expand the world, and still make sense cinematically. Instead, The Mortuary Assistant cheats its audience, leaning into genre tropes with all the originality of a Halloween store skeleton prop. What should have been an unsettling exploration of terror and trauma plays out like the funeral for the game itself.

In the end, audiences will leave the theater not terrified, not moved, but mildly puzzled, like discovering someone swapped their coffin with a cardboard box and wrote “Sorry!” on the lid. That’s not homage. That’s malpractice.

The Mortuary Assistant (2026) is unrated, but we’ll call it PG-13 for swears, dead people, possession, bloodletting, graphic depictions of the embalming process, and kid-friendly thematic dread.