Bella Brady is a young mortician at her family funeral home in south Pittsburgh and she’s in for one hell of an experience when the body of a recently deceased serial killer unleashes a supernatural hell storm in the cozy family business. The corpse has been embalmed but thanks to the self-inflicted gunshot wound that ended his life, Bella has restorative work to accomplish before his wake on Monday. Of course, she doesn’t know about the man’s unsettling past but as the night drags on, she’ll be learning things she didn’t want to know about the dead man in her care. A disquieting suicide note causes a chain reaction of unpleasantness and the claims of something needing “one hundred” that the dead man couldn’t finish points to an unfortunate fate coming our hero’s way. When she lets her police officer ex know about the suicide note that comes off more like a confessional, his discovery at a location named in the note has the local authorities claiming the corpse as their property pending further investigating. Bella is told to sit tight but the presence of something malignant that has been around for a long time is now haunting the building and is going to make that an impossible task. Control is lost and innocent (and some not-so innocent) people will end up dead. The nightmare is caught on the large number of security cameras her father has insisted on putting up (a few break ins have him worried about the local teens smoking his embalming fluid because teenagers will always be idiots) and the tutorial footage she is shooting with her own camera. Zoe Graham is terrific in the lead and brings a lovely charisma to her immensely likable protagonist. Her relationship with her father rings true and for the brief glimpse we get, it’s pretty damn cute. It only suffers from a possession angle that we’ve seen many times before but any boredom just fades away thanks to its cast and solid script. Andrew Bowser (who shows up as the funeral home maintenance man with a helpful knowledge of true crime and an easy chemistry with Bella) delivers a found footage flick that is both spooky and playful as it lets its dark narrative breath within the handful of hours it takes place in, finally boiling over into some nasty violence.
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