Blu-ray Review: The Mortuary Assistant – “a delightfully creepy and atmospheric horror”

Directed by Jeremiah Kipp
Starring Willa Holland, Paul Sparks

Jeremiah Kipp (Slapface) returns with a delightfully creepy and atmospheric horror in The Mortuary Assistant, co-written by Brian Clarke, who created the original video game which inspired the film, and Tracee Beebe. Yes, this is that unusual beast, a fascinating flick born from a video game, brought to us via Shudder. We meet Rebecca (Willa Holland), undertaking her final practical examination in mortuary science – she performs an embalming procedure on a corpse by herself, but supervised by Raymond (Paul Sparks), which adds a touch of nervousness to the already somewhat macabre work; not only do we watch all the tools of the mortician’s trade being used, we also have Rebecca having to look up to her supervisor frequently, wondering if she is performing correctly, the sort of thing that would make most of us nervous, no matter how much we have practised an learned.

At first it is hard to tell how he is rating her – Raymond seems very quiet, very unemotional and hard to read, but when she pauses once or twice and asks if she was doing something wrong, he quietly reassures her she is doing fine. She is now qualified to work for him, to her relief. We start to learn that Rebecca is in recovery, in a sponsored programme for addiction recovery, and this is her one-year anniversary of being clean, so passing her exams, getting her new job secured and being free of her addiction all coincide.

However, all of this also makes her a target for what will follow. After initially telling her she didn’t need to volunteer for the “graveyard shift” (sorry, bad pun for a mortuary-based film, I know), he later calls her to say something has come up and can she go in to take care of some work overnight, which she is happy to do. As you can imagine, a funeral home at night, with just bodies in storage and a single, solitary live person, is a fairly creepy setting to begin with, and Kipp takes this and uses it to slowly build atmosphere. We already saw Raymond gently remonstrate with Rebecca for going to a basement storage space for more supplies, saying she doesn’t need to go down there, which right away signals that there is something here she is not meant to know… And of course there is.

Kipp starts it quietly and slowly – tiny little things, like reading a list of preparations for a body which is then to be simply cremated – why carry out all this work if the body is just going to be burnt to ashes?? Still, these are the instructions, and Rebecca dutifully follows them. And that’s when we start to notice little things, like the way an eye suddenly blinks or the head tilts on a corpse on the preparation table when she isn’t looking. Just little movements, no big jump scare, and it is far more effective this way.

Noises and strange visions soon start to come to Rebecca, and some seem to tie back to events in her past, involving running away while on substance abuse, her father desperately trying to find her, but something happens to him, for which she blames herself. At one point she becomes even more freaked out when she finds herself back in her own apartment, with no memory of leaving the funeral home, then a banging on the door – her sponsor from the addiction programme, who she called (but again has no memory of doing so). Obviously her sponsor takes this as a sign that she has relapsed, despite Rebecca’s protests, but then things just get stranger. And then Raymond calls for her and tells her urgently that she has to go back. She says no, she is scared to go back after the weird experiences there, but he insists she must, and that, for reasons he won’t elaborate on, she will be safer there than at home.

Now we become even more suspicious of Raymond – he clearly knew something was likely to happen, has been waiting and watching for it to unfold, but what is it and why? What is his role? Is he helping her or using her? It becomes harder to tell even after he explains some of it – demonic beings trying to take control of recently deceased bodies, but they use links to certain people, people with troubled pasts that the demon knows all about and exactly how to exploit, people like recovering addicts like Rebecca…

I don’t want to ruin too much of this by explaining too much more. Suffice to say Kipp ratchets things slowly, and puts us alongside Rebecca in not knowing exactly what is going on or what to do – should she trust Raymond? He hasn’t told her everything, this is clear, but why? And then there are moments when he does seem to explain something to her on the phone, but gives her very odd, harmful instructions, only for the phone to ring again moments later and it is Raymond saying he didn’t just speak to her, he has in fact been trying to call her for some time. Was he lying? Was it the demon impersonating him, trying to trick her to its bidding? Both? The levels of creepiness and the inability to tell who to trust, or if she can even trust her own senses, builds continually, and we feel ourselves being drawn into this nightmare with Rebecca,

The film evoked memories of the excellent Brian Cox-starring The Autopsy of Jane Doe, partly because of the funeral home setting, but also because both chose the slow, something isn’t quite right approach that gradually unfolds from there’s something wrong here to what was that, to oh my god, and that just works so well, loading the atmosphere and tension. It doesn’t hurt that when we get glimpses of the demon, in its own form, outside of any cadaver it is trying to control, it is a simple but very creepy looking critter. This is one to watch late night, with the lights down.

The Mortuary Assistant is available on demand, DVD and Blu-Ray from Acorn Media Entertainment from the 20th of July.