The story is about a night that Diego Martínez is locked inside the morgue of the Regional Hospital of Encarnación and recounts the paranormal events that the security guard spent.
Hugo Cardozo delivers his feature film directorial debut with “Morgue,” a movie about a security guard who gets trapped inside a morgue in a hospital in Paraguay. While the setting and the story have all the elements necessary to create a frightening and sinister atmosphere, sadly, its execution, or lack thereof, is what leads to its eventual downfall.
Diego Martínez (Pablo Martínez) is a young private security guard who lives in the city of Encarnación in Paraguay. On his way to his girlfriend’s house one night, he momentarily loses his concentration on the road while trying to pick up his fallen cell phone. With a thud and a bang, he screeches to a halt and jumps out of his car to see a body lying on the road in front of his vehicle but instead of rendering help or calling the police, he drives back to his apartment.
The next day, his boss calls and asks him to take the night shift at the local hospital as one of the other guards has fallen ill. He turns up at the arranged time and is briefly shown around the morgue by the day shift security guard who also makes it a point to show him one dead body in the morgue. Diego inquires into it and is told that he was killed in a hit-and-run accident the night before, leading him to believe that it is the person he struck with his car the previous night but he is too scared to look under the covers. The security guard leaves and Diego is left to his own devices. As the evening draws on, Diego begins to experience strange goings-on and before the night is through, he will discover that while the morgue is a place for the departed, not all of them roll over and play dead.
As I stated earlier, the location and screenplay combined could, in the hands of a more accomplished filmmaker, lend themselves to a genuinely creepy and ominous feature but because of director Hugo Cardozo’s lack of experience, he never truly attains the greatness that could have been achieved. Scenes drag on for way too long with absolutely no culmination; Diego searches a vast assortment of empty rooms where nothing happens, he makes himself a cup of coffee and we witness him pouring the water into the cup, adding the sugar, adding the creamer, and after what feels like an eternity, the scene ends, he walks up and down hallways where, once again, nothing comes into existence.
I get it though, Cardoza is trying to set the tone, where the morgue is seemingly dead upon first being introduced to it, and later on, it will come to life but when that finally materializes, it is done in such a haphazard manner, that any and all expectation of genuine scares deteriorates into stereotypical and unoriginal horror tropes. An old door slowly creaks open and there’s nobody behind it – check! Diego shines his flashlight on a strange figure only for it to disappear and then reappear when he lowers his light – check! A cup clumsily moves across a table and freaks Diego out for a moment but then he goes back to watching the TV – check!
It’s clear that Cardoza was inspired by the horror films of the ’70s and the ’80s and personally, they were the best two decades for horror but inspiration alone is not enough to deliver a scary movie. The scene where the metal cup moves across the table is embarrassing, it is painfully obvious that there was someone sitting under the table moving a corresponding magnet, giving the cup an awkward and amateurish motion, almost as if the magnet got stuck for a few moments and then got free. The old creaky door with nobody behind it effect is used way too much, as well as most of the other horror aspects, and when we finally reach the finale, we are besieged with a plethora of twists but because the movie never properly invested us in Diego and his situation, deciding to concentrate more on the scare factor, they mean absolutely nothing.
As an indie filmmaker myself, I have to give Cardoza props for securing a genuinely spooky location, I just wish the screenplay utilized it to better effect instead of relying on it solely to scare the audience. After all, an old building, or a morgue, or even a graveyard, is not scary without human interaction or a backstory on its history. Pablo Martínez as Diego does fine in his role, he is just underutilized while the visual aspects are given greater care and consideration. Even the artwork is misleading, it shows what appears to be an old house in the middle of nowhere, situated next to a graveyard while the actual setting takes place in a morgue within a major city hospital. “Morgue” sets out with great aspirations but sadly, falls short on all of them.
Available on Blu-ray™, DVD, and Digital May 11th
