Postmortem (2026) by Andres Beltran

Director: Andres Beltran

Year: 2026

Country: USA

Alternate Titles: N/A

Genre: Supernatural

Plot:

Still grieving the loss of her husband, a city morgue worker gets wind of a special cult that had died trying to perform a ritual that would bring the dead back to life and tries to learn how to do it herself, bringing back the figure she thought was her husband, but soon proves to be something else entirely.

Review:

Overall, this was a fairly solid and likable genre effort. One of the better elements with this one is the incredibly strong and likable storyline that manages to generate a really effective motivation for what’s going on as everything here unravels. Giving this a really effective starting point with her grieving and emotional loss at her husband’s death, trying to get past his death and the loneliness she feels as a result of being left with a demanding job and ungrateful daughter alone without him, that we get a fine sense of why she would want to go through with the practice once she hears about the proposition it promises. The specific case it presents, where the Mexican cult members are found dead after going through a special arcane ritual looking to bring their dead leader back to life and learning about the kind of superstitions and rituals that are going on that were being attempted to do this, works quite well at generating the kind of solid specific backstory to make her desire to perform it herself feel entirely earned and validated.

That manages to make the turn into the supernatural and her explicit intentions to follow their teachings come off quite nicely. The idea of her trying to learn more about the cult and their resurrection spell that can be used as a means of bringing her husband back adds the only real genre touches here until you get to the point where she’s successfully raised him from the dead and is tending to his revived body. This is quite eerie enough, focused on the idea that he looks similar to their memories of him, but the vacant expression, distorted skin, and generally unnatural vibe make for a genuinely unsettling experience that only gets more obvious when the true extent of what she’s done has started to take place. With this providing the film with the majority of its gore, as well as one of the more eerie and unsettling sequences where she must navigate a darkened basement using multiple matches, it comes off incredibly well with how it plays out and manages to provide this with a lot to like about it.

There are some issues here that hold this one down. One of the main factors with this one is the rather sluggish, slow-going pacing that manages to bring about the genuinely underwhelming tempo that this plays out at. With the majority of the first half devoted entirely to her struggles with getting past her husband’s death, the relationships she has at the morgue, who work there with her, and the need to find out more when the cult’s bodies come into the building, this is a really fun way to get her story started, yet it also manages to stifle a lot of the intended supernatural antics and hauntings until later in the film. It’s well over an hour before anything remotely terrifying starts to happen, making a lot of this a slog to get through when most of what’s going on is simply repeated use of a series of behavioral issues that are quite problematic and show telltale signs of something being wrong to anyone with functioning eyes, yet another issue here that makes the beginning a bit of an issue to get through. On the whole, these are what manage to bring this one down overall.

Overview: ****/5

An engaging if somewhat sluggish genre effort, there’s quite a lot to like here that manages to keep this one going along incredibly well, which gives this enough to work with to offset some minor flaws here. Those with an appreciation for the style or approach, or who are curious about it, will want to give it a shot, while most others out there might want to heed caution.