Review: ‘Morgue’ Offers Up a Few Frights but Mostly Falls Flat

May 7, 2021

It’s always a major disappointment to find a film with an amazing premise but fails to deliver. It doesn’t necessarily make it a bad film, but ends up being a casualty of expectation. Such is the case with Hugo Cardoza’s Morgue. It has the ingredients of being something great but ends up dragging quite a bit, even with just an eighty-minute runtime. The Spanish-language film is coming to disc and digital on May 11th from Well Go USA. Morgue requires very low expectations and a ton of patience if you’re to get any satisfaction from it.

Diego Martinez (Pablo Martinez) is the textbook definition of a man down on his luck. No money, about to lose his girl, and his car’s a piece of junk. While on his way home one evening, he experiences a traumatic event that he walks away from. The next night, he finds himself working as a security guard at a hospital overseeing the morgue. Left there alone over night, things begin to happen that he can’t explain and the haunting truth behind the trauma he accidentally caused will eat away at him unless he can come to terms with it.

Morgue is a small film made on a tight budget with a very small cast. In fact, much of the film is Pablo Martinez reacting to the possible haunting within the morgue. Martinez is a good performer and he does exactly what he needs to. What’s important, and I’m trying to avoid any spoilers, is the fact he remains a somewhat sympathetic character regardless of some questionable actions he makes. The rest of the cast does fine, but they’re very minor characters and are only needed to move the story forward when necessary.

Director Cardoza tries to play things low key while building suspense. He has the atmosphere right, but much of it feels stretched out. There are a couple of creepy moments and jump scares that work, but there’s just too much time in between. My issue is that the movie is only an hour-and-twenty minutes. The time should fly by without the audience even realizing it. That’s just not the case with Morgue. There are too many long and slow moments that never quite work. The premise is good, it’s stretched far too thin. This would have, perhaps, been better as part of an anthology.

Morgue is not a bad film by any means, it’s just disappointing. There are several missteps throughout, but it does have a solid story, great acting, and a few good scares to round it out. I, personally, would not recommend, but it may work for other viewers. Just proceed with caution.