Director: Jeremiah Kipp
Year: 2026
Country: USA
Alternate Titles: N/A
Genre: Supernatural
Plot:
Taking a job at the local morgue, an eager worker tries to get on good terms with her boss by working a special shift with a strange cadaver that's been brought in for embalming, but as the night goes on, she learns that a demonic entity attached to the corpse has now targeted her.
Review:
For the most part, this was a fairly solid if slightly disappointing genre effort. Among the better factors on display here comes from the rather strong and enjoyable central setup that takes place at the facility. Getting an early look at her work within the facility by managing to look closely at the way she handles the difficulties of the job and its various demands, bringing up how demanding she is to get the job and what is expected of her, which ties nicely into the series of interactions that takes place later on involving the demonic being targeting her and the facility. This early setup gives us enough of a look at her personality and mindset so that it can bring about the demonic interactions and tasks later on, which gets this going on a nice note.
Those later scenes, mainly involving the series of hauntings and supernatural sequences that note the presence of the demonic being in the body that now haunts the facility, serve to bring about some rather chilling moments. With the raging thunderstorm and the series of genuinely chilling setpieces that are brought up, from the eerie whispers, outright terrifying reanimation sequences, and the attempts at destroying the physical body, which go nowhere since it just brings her back to the same position she was in before, offer a fine kind of nightmare logic that gives this a lot to like. That there’s just as much fun to be had with the different interactions here featuring the flash visions of different demonically deformed figures appearing to taunt and torment her that help to provide even more chilling sequences, and with the puzzle-solving aspects at play in the second half here, gives this a lot to like.
There are some big issues here holding this one down. The biggest detriment to this one is the immensely troublesome and generally confusing nature of what’s going on with the various demonic possession scenes, since there’s little cohesion to anything that happens. Most of these early elements are built more like a general overarching series of checklist-style setpieces or ideas that never build to anything, offering only a jumpscare at the end to give the slightest hint of distrust in her mindset after the great build-up. This leaves these scenes with the kind of disorienting sense of confusion where nothing makes sense because it’s just moving on to the next shocking startle for the heroine, leaving it hard to get a grasp on what she’s supposed to be doing to free herself when it just changes so randomly.
As well, with the ritualistic performances and procedures having little connection or purpose, it just feels like random quests to do things to pad out the running time more than anything that might have more in common with fans of the video game source material than anything. Performing some random instruction, going right back to the beginning again with little context, and being expected to trust that the new person she’s talking with has her best interest at heart leaves it all to feel rather bland and repetitive. Alongside the flimsy effects work that has some immensely obvious and bad CGI that never becomes remotely believable, these all make for a rather disappointing feature.
Overview: **.5/5
A solid enough take on the video game property, this one comes together well enough for what it is, even though the majority of the issues here are pretty detrimental and do damage to this one in the long run. Those with an interest in the original game and curious to see it transferred to another medium, or those who are fans of the creative crew, will have the most to like with this one, as most others should heed caution.
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