“The Mortuary Assistant” attempts to follow in the footsteps of “Five Nights at Freddy’s” and more recently “Iron Lung” by adapting a small indie horror video game to the big screen. While those two films were surprising box office successes, it may be a tougher road for “The Mortuary Assistant” which is expected to get a limited theatrical release before streaming on Shudder starting March 27th.

“The Mortuary Assistant” video game came out in 2022 and was primarily developed by Brian Clarke’s one-person studio, DarkStone Digital. It had a low budget and a small scale, but it was well-received by players and critics. The movie adaptation is somewhat similar – modest budget and small in scope. Director Jeremiah Kipp does some good things with a film that’s certain to register more with fans of the game. Others might struggle to make sense of it all.

The film’s biggest strength is Willa Holland. She plays Rebecca Owens, a young woman whose life has been marked by trauma. Yet she has found victory in her struggles. She’s a recovering alcoholic who is celebrating one year of sobriety. And she’s nearing the end of an internship for a job she’s surprisingly enthusiastic about – a mortuary assistant. But unfortunately for her, this is a horror movie, which means everything in her world is about to be turned upside-down.

After successfully embalming her final supervised procedure, her boss Raymond Delver (Paul Sparks) welcomes Rebecca to a full-time position at River Fields Mortuary. The peculiarly adamant Raymond assigns her the day shift while he insists on handling nights. But after Raymond calls Rebecca to fill in for him, she finds herself thrust into a terrifying situation, locked inside the mortuary overnight with corpses being reanimated by demonic entities. Yikes.

It’s certainly a promising premise and (to his credit) Kipp squeezes everything he can from it. The fittingly chilling mortuary setting adds plenty of good atmosphere. And it’s helped by the eerie use of light and shadows and some standout practical effects. But the story is plagued by overwritten and sometimes confusing exposition that muddies as much as it reveals. And while much of what we see desperately needs explaining, the info dumps often stymie the suspense.

The same can be said for Rebecca’s clumsily handled backstory. It’s thrown together in pieces, all in an effort to feed an on-the-nose metaphor that becomes too obvious to be effective. Alcoholism and personal loss are worthwhile subjects, and Holland does her best to make them feel central to Rebecca’s story. But they come across as pieces that don’t always fit with the rest of the movie.

“The Mortuary Assistant” starts off with a lot of promise, and you can see all the ingredients for a wickedly entertaining chiller. It certainly has the commitment in its star Willa Holland and the technical know-how from director Jeremiah Kipp. But the too frequent “Let me explain” moments bog things down while the ‘dream versus reality’ aspect grows more repetitive than revelatory. It all undermines the movie’s ambition and leaves us with an experience that can’t quite match the strength of its source material.