“Alone with the dead.
Rebecca Owens, a recent mortuary science graduate takes a night shift job at River Fields Mortuary. Initially, the job seems straightforward — embalming bodies, completing paperwork, and keeping things tidy. But once Rebecca starts working the night shift, things take a dark turn.” – Letterboxd Synopsis
Horror is in a great spot across most mediums right now, but especially movies and video games. It makes me so happy that this horror renaissance that kicked off almost a decade ago is still going strong. Which, with me already being familiar with this game, gave me high-ish hopes for this movie. My girlfriend and I have a YouTuber we like who really loves this game, and we watched him play it a lot. So when it was announced, it got picked up for a movie; I saw the vision. The game had the bones for a good-to-great movie. Sadly, it really didn’t come together at all.
There’s no such thing as a friction-less adaptation. There will always be something lost in translation when adapting between mediums which need to be made up for in the end result. In recent years, video game adaptations have done a 180 reputation wise. But very few of these adaptations are 1:1. Most use the characters and the universe to tell a story within said universe. A story can be told completely differently in a video game as opposed to any other medium because you’re actually playing it. You are in control. And quite frankly, a lot of video game story writing leaves a lot to be desired in the more traditional sense, but excels at that one thing that no other medium can offer. Which often leaves the lore being way more interesting than the actual beat-by-beat story. What gave me high hopes for this adaptation is that there was a lot of solid character and story writing to work with. That really gets squandered badly.
So here lies my biggest problems with this movie, which made me come to a realization. In just an hour and thirty minutes, this movie attempts to put every story beat from the game while also badly extrapolating on a fair few of them. Including the multiple endings and showing off gameplay mechanics. I swear there were multiple tutorials in here, too. And while it can all feel amazing at first glance when paired with the close attention to detail in the sets and even casting accuracy. After that initial awe starts to fade, I realized that one, this was a weak translation, and two, this movie focuses on the wrong things and foregoes all subtlety and horror in favor for a really streamlined in-your-face trauma-dump horror movie. That ends up not excelling at any of that.
What makes the game scary is that, at its core, it’s a repetitive deduction game. The tension comes from trying to figure out which bodies are possessed or not and doing the job over and over again as the hauntings start to ramp up and Rebecca’s traumatic past begins to be pulled to light. That tension built from the repetition is completely absent in this movie because she doesn’t do many bodies; only the first one isn’t possessed, and every other one after that, she is already told what she needs to do. So very early on in the movie, it lost all its tension. The scariest moments from the game come from those deduction moments, and the “in the corner of your eye, you may miss them haunts.” This movie has none of that. Again, it completely forgoes all subtlety and puts everything in your face, and it’s for the worse.
Horror and trauma can go hand in hand. Manifesting someone’s trauma into something is the easiest way to scare a character and scare an audience, and it’s ripe for great storytelling. Rebecca’s story is interesting. It just is. She’s made mistakes, she’s fucked up big time, but she is trying. In both the game and the movie, it makes you want to root for her. Unfortunately, when it comes to this movie, I couldn’t bring myself to care. Regardless of anything else in this adaptation, Rebbeca’s story should have been a home run, but it’s just marred down so much.
It’s really interesting. She was an addict from a young age who feels responsible for her father’s death and still deals with the thoughts of her mother’s suicide and her own suicidal ideations. She is now very far along in recovery and taking this job, which ends up getting her tangled in a mess with a demon who quite literally feeds off of trauma. The idea is great, the execution is not. Even in the game, there are just some jarring and, honestly, silly moments. I really wish the movie had taken a more subtle approach to unraveling her trauma. Instead, for most of it, she is being actively blatantly haunted by it. Quite frankly, I think it’s more a point in the movie than it is in the game, and it’s not done in a way that made me care more or at all. It takes a lot away from the movie; it’s just as goofy as the game at some points, and it’s very heavy-handed when a subtler touch would’ve done wonders for opening up the movie’s pacing and also making it more of a character feature that it clearly wanted to be.
Raymond is funnily accurate to the game. Sounds like him, has similar janky mannerisms. And that would be all fine and dandy if he were used as he was in the game. This movie has a serious issue of giving away too much. In the game, there’s this mystery around him and what he knows and why he knows it, and that mystery is perpetuated because, for the most part, you only hear him. He is this dissonant voice. Cut to the movie, where instead of leaving him and his whereabouts more mysterious, they cut to him a lot, and he’s always doing something. And as I said earlier, there are literally multiple scenes of him just giving Rebecca a tutorial. It was fun and silly the first time, but every time after that, I rolled my eyes. What are we doing? And there are other characters in this movie, but they may as well not even be here.
On the bright side, this is a really good-looking movie. The sets are almost 1:1, and the costume and makeup design are actually amazing. This is the one part of the movie that they absolutely nailed. Whenever Rebecca is actually doing mortuary assistant stuff and embalming and messing around with the dead bodies, it is properly “gory.” Just a fantastic job across the board, pretty much. I can only think of a few interesting (derogatory) scene transitions and camera cuts. But the makeup and prosthetics were flawless.
So yeah, this movie really missed the mark when it came to adapting the game. Too many wrong decisions in my opinion. What could’ve been at bare minimum a solid horror movie, but also had the potential to be a really good and emotional character piece. Ends up being bad and boring. I wish it were better. I think this game deserved better. Just unfortunate all around. I’m writing this last bit about a week after I watched it, and I’ve almost forgotten about it already, so ya know.
The Mortuary Assistant – 2/10
