The Mortuary Assistant (2026)
The Mortuary Assistant | Another Bad Video Game Movie
Written by Noah Dietz: 4/3/2026
It's not enough to make a movie that looks good (this doesn't); the script also has to make any kind of sense at all. There has to be balance, there has to be a reason. Stories have to have a point that they exist for; otherwise why waste your time telling it? Why waste the time of those foolish enough to listen? What is to be gained by duping people who were fans of the product you’ve chosen to adapt? Poisoning the original creation in the search of turning a middling profit?
The Mortuary Assistant might be the worst movie I’ve seen so far this year.
There are so many complaints that can be leveled against this film, and as many hollow defenses. This might not be the worst acted film I’ve ever seen, but that’s not to say there aren’t atrocious performances present. Paul Sparks' line deliveries as the mortician Raymond Delver, for example, are so stilted and amateurish that I was shocked to learn he’s an Emmy nominated actor. The other performances we get throughout the film fluctuate between frantically overacted and weirdly subdued to the point you wonder if the entire cast is on Xanax. Sometimes these things will even happen in the same scene, like when Rebecca (Willa Holland) interacts with Ben (John Adams). Rebecca comes off as completely vacant and dead to the world in most of their interactions, while Ben is a certified Evil Dead 2 deadite who is hamming it up every second he’s on screen. Additionally, the lack of directing balance for these scenes make it hard to parse what the energy of the film is even supposed to be, firmly cementing this as a studio cash grab.
On a story front, the whole experience makes no sense if you’re not familiar with the game it’s based on. I have no idea how viewers who don't have some sort of experience with the game are even supposed to engage with this, because as somebody who did have half a clue, I was still completely lost the entire time. In a game where you’re forced to interact with the world, it doesn’t matter as much if the story is a little thin. The game mechanics can help bridge a variety of gaps left by moments that the story won’t hold up under scrutiny. When those same gameplay elements are shown off in the movie with their only purpose being onscreen appearance for viewers to point and gawk at, it feels like padding at best, and incompetent adapting at worst. Things that could be referred to as "foreshadowing" do happen, but every moment is meaningless without some established knowledge of the game to make them make sense. God knows the film isn’t going to tell you in any sort of tasteful manner either. Instead of opting for something that would make sense for the language of film, around the 40-minute point we’re granted the gift of a full 5 minutes of hard exposition where the “rules” of the world are outlined for us. This type of information exchange is tolerable in a video game’s tutorial level, but in a film? Unacceptable.
The one kind thing I can say about this is that the monster looks nice. I like his weird, exoskeleton-adjacent shiny skin, and I like his unsettling face. But the film can’t let a decent element lie, because if you look at the poster, it’s not the same thing from the movie. Hell, it’s not even the same thing from the game. We’ve got an obviously AI-generated poster that looks like it was trained on the creature from the film, but it’s blatantly not the same thing. This further undercuts any sort of artistic integrity the film has, in addition to preemptively putting off any even remotely discerning viewer.
It’s always embarrassing to see studios try to capitalize on what they feel is a hot trend. With the highly anticipated Backrooms and the wildly successful Iron Lung this year, it’s not hard to see why some would want to try and capitalize on video game adaptations. Unfortunately, this one needed more work before it left the writing room, much less started filming. This film is preying on a perceived younger audience who either won’t care or won’t notice the low quality product they’re being given. A film that plays the exact same 5-minute scene over and over in different rooms for the final thirty minutes of the film like it’s rattling a set of toy keys at me to keep my attention. It’s disrespectful to the game it was based on, and it’s disrespectful to people who dared to be excited about a film adaptation of a game they enjoyed.
Film: The Mortuary Assisitant
Director: Jeremiah Kipp
Writers: Tracee Beebe, Brian Clarke
Release Year: 2026
Rating: 1/5
The Mortuary Assistant is 90 minutes of nothing, punctuated by two scenes of "spoken directly to the camera" style exposition that are intentionally obtuse to the point of being pure gibberish. Not even worth seeing as a curiosity.