Willa Holland stars as Rebecca Owens, a young woman who’s trying to put her life back together by finishing her training as a mortician’s assistant, while also receiving her one year sober chip from Narcotics Anonymous. All in all, things are going swimmingly for Rebecca—until her boss, Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks), unexpectedly calls her back in to work overnight after her first day, because the mortuary has just seen a large influx of fresh corpses. But Rebecca still easily manages the extra work, despite the raging thunderstorm outside that plays havoc with the electricity. The flickering lights keep making Rebecca see things in the darkened corners of the mortuary. She sees some really creepy, unnerving imagery—like the corpses moving ever so subtly on the tables, or one corpse that suddenly has a mouth filled with fangs—but everything weird she’s seeing is strictly a result of the spotty lighting. Right? Right?!
I first saw Willa Holland on the Arrow CW show, where she played Thea Queen, the kid sister of Oliver Queen (aka the DC Comics superhero Green Arrow). Thea would eventually take up a bow and arrow and become a superhero in her own right on that series, which ultimately managed to squander its own potential in favor of dopey soap opera. Still, Holland’s natural charm made her stand out as Thea, who became one of my favorite characters on that series. She left the show after six years, and I don't blame her—for Arrow, which had been entertaining up to that point, had already begun to devolve badly right around her departure. Perhaps Holland saw what was coming. In doing research for this review, I discovered an interesting fact: Holland is the stepdaughter of film director Brian De Palma (Carrie, Dressed To Kill), who was briefly married to her mother back in the 1990s.
And so I was pleased to see Holland not only pop up again, but that she was the lead actress in a new film. I only wish that The Mortuary Assistant was much better than it is. The Mortuary Assistant is based on a video game, which I’ve never played—in fact, I had never even heard of it until I did the research for this review of the film. But the first big strike against the film is that the filmmakers operate on the presumption that the viewer has played the game and is coming in knowing all the lore and back story. I didn’t, and I was pretty much lost through most of this. While I was still able to enjoy the basic story of a mortuary attendant having a really weird night on the job, there were constant references to an even more epic story, with the hint that Rebecca and Paul might well be special people with unique abilities. But this concept is never really explored in any satisfying way.
Paul Sparks is also very good here as the mortuary owner who knows more than he’s letting on, at least in the beginning. But when he starts explaining everything to Rebecca, droning on and on about plot details that originated in the video game, the movie reduces him into Exposition Guy. And the depictions of the supernatural is frustrating. It’s soon made clear that Rebecca is battling a demon that wants to possess her—and then we abruptly see that she already is possessed by said demon. But just when I think this is a cool plot twist, Rebecca goes back to normal...I think. The Mortuary Assistant winds up being a very confusing film that doesn’t seem to know what it is, or where it wants to go. But, just like she did with Arrow, Willa Holland manages to class up another lesser production with just her charming presence. --SF
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