There’s an embalming taking place as we open on The Mortuary Assistant (2026) – embalmment being normal practice, rather than an occasional thing, in the US. Here, intern Rebecca (Willa Holland) is being assessed on her skills in the field, so she can finally be signed off as competent – though I tell you what, I wouldn’t be wearing my hair loose doing that job. But she does well, completes her probation and – as she’s told by the rather ominous funeral home owner Raymond (Paul Sparks) – she’s now ready to work alone. She’ll be doing the day shift: only ever the day shift. And, Bluebeard-style, she’s banned from one room in the premises – the basement. Of course it’s the basement.
Outside work and later on that day, we get a sense of who Rebecca is: a young woman who has been through a run of personal trials and tribulations, struggling to get sober after a long period of addiction. However, we leave it there, because after all the solemn avowals that she’ll never be asked to work the night shift, Rebecca gets called in after dark to deal with a sudden influx of cadavers. Pathetic fallacy abounds as, with a storm raging outside, Rebecca gets to work. Soon, there are questions: these bodies all seem to show momentary signs of life, and they’re all unusually mangled, displaying signs of extensive violence.
Up against all of this, timelines soon begin to blur and fracture: aspects of Rebecca’s troubled past begin to merge with inexplicable phenomena at the funeral home, whilst Raymond offers occasional guidance (by phone!) on what may or may not be going on here. The one thing which is clear is that the mortuary itself is key to deciphering the horrors soon unfolding around this vulnerable young woman. Whilst it’s not quite clear whether ‘it’ is already inside with her or fighting to get in, the film offers up a slew of creepy, effective set pieces in service of solving this riddle.
The more ‘hidden’ death has become in modern society, the bigger the fascination with what goes on back there: who’s responsible for handling the dead? And what happens when they do? This can be horror enough (see, for example, Broken Bird), but interestingly, horror cinema has tended to explore this particular anxiety through a supernatural lens. Perhaps it’s a way of making it all matter by adding some kind of a gloss of an afterlife, even if a deeply dysfunctional one. Regardless, in films such as the underrated Unrest (2006) and The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), the funeral home segues into being a haunted house: The Mortuary Assistant does something similar, albeit blending mortuary practice and occult ritual in a series of novel, intriguing ways. There are even some hints, arguably, of the same sorts of OTT, tricksy, jubilant entities of Evil Dead/Evil Dead II, meaning a dark night of the soul and then some for Rebecca. The use of graphic, practical SFX will almost certainly endear this film to many horror fans, and it’s also heartening to see some male bodies on the slab – not just formerly nubile young women, as is the norm.
Once we set our table, the middle act of the film feels like a shift away from the initially quicker-moving pace and plot (which requires some element of explication via the script). From here, the horror becomes much more repetitive and grinding, reliant on the sense of an inescapable nightmare for its impact, which will not be for everyone: onwards impetus is not really what The Mortuary Assistant is all about. However, if you can get on board with this, then there’s a lot to love: visually strong and nicely atmospheric, the film looks every inch a slick ‘Shudder Presents’ title, all muted tones and unflinching gore by turns (it’s also directed by Jeremiah Kipp, whose excellent earlier film Slapface (2021) was another Shudder title). You certainly don’t need to be familiar with the video game from which this title has been adapted, either: this works perfectly well on its own terms, and doesn’t feel artificially loaded with nods to the source material, despite a handful of sequences which resemble gameplay. Admittedly, fans of the game may well have more bones to pick with this one, and this seems to be the case in some other reviews. But for the rest of us, it’s a horror film, it works as such and there’s plenty to like here for those just looking for a Friday night movie.
The Mortuary Assistant (2026) releases on Shudder on March 26th, 2026.