Review of The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) by Pipec — 21 Jul 2017

A Disruptive Serendipity In The Horror Genre.

Is there anything better than a feature film of your predilection to catch you unprepared? Personally, I don't think so. Such awe has been experienced by a considerable portion of fussy cinephiles who attended the screening of a contemporary gem that came out of the Sitges Film Festival. Winner of the Special Jury Award at the last edition of the festival, "The Autopsy of Jane Doe" is the brand-new ambrosia of the filmmaker who gained universal distinction seven years ago with an improvement of the currently infected mockumentary.

The story takes us to the basement-morgue of the Tilden family: an old man and his son, two coroners who spend days inquiring into the justification of the death of thousands and thousands of lackadaisical and whitish organisms. While Tommy is looking for the right way to inform his father about his desires, the sheriff unexpectedly bursts into with an unscathed female corpse found at the scene of a crime in Virginia. Father and son initiate a detective journey to know the cause of her death, stumbling upon endless unnatural inconsistencies that trigger in a manic game of cat and mouse, only here cat is dead (literally).

I miss the time when an interesting story, an exceptionally gifted and a perceptive director was enough to make a horror film with possibilities of becoming a classic. And that's how many of the film summits are forged, movies whose exclusive pretense is to portray the malignancy while simultaneously elevating with formidable simplicity our cortisol levels, in other slang, spend a creepy pleasant time. Now, that vintage horror hasn't disappeared today, at least in form, since there are millions of remakes and reboots. However, in treatment and essence, only an indie directors clan and a negligible number of commercial filmmakers manage to retake these old-time techniques by giving them an intelligent and equally terrifying stamp. So André Øvredal joins this restricted list with a necropsy to evil.

The film handles a progression of radically impracticable features in the field at present. It's a formidable elaborated horror experiment that benefits from Brian Cox's and Emile Hirsch's compatible performances as Sherlock and his fellow, a relationship with fascinating affability the thread narrative, promoting that the characters get along with audiences in the almost excellent first half of the story.

This is a sample that a solid tale, narrated in a successful way, doesn't presuppose pompous visual effects. It's a new trend provided by the overwhelming indie movies. Classified as "art cinema", Øvredal's work was truly electrifying to me, not as indie one, it had the facade of a work at the hands of a low-budget film studio, with properly American twists and conclusions but with developments, strangeness and stimulating resolutions capable of generating stupor.

It's a first rate mise-en-scène, benefiting from the oppressive dismal sets, plus incidental musicality, atmospheric shots of the lacquered wooden corridors, the metallic edges of the morgue or the outdated and gloomy elevator. Space manipulation deserves its own section, no doubt, one of the best-achieved aspects of the whole film, using mirrors, shines, visual distortions, blind spots and above all opacity in order to make assistant's hair stand on end, unprepared people with the conception that they would witness pig's breakfast. What a surprise!

Unfortunately, it's not entirely perfect and in the ending, we feel a certain hesitation, symbolizing the confusing narrative conclusion, a double-edged sword, in addition, it doesn't detach from clichés and unjustifiable scares in the genre, however, they're bearable but frustrating. Just imagine you're embedded in the remotest darkness, but, you're not the only one in the place, you have the pleasure of having as companions to six corpses that are no longer within their corresponding cold rooms, you glimpse in the black mess that everything is upside down and in the middle of the scene lies a woman as pale as snow, unleashing unimaginable horrors, but suddenly, you spin around and a face with a mouth sewn shut catches you by surprise. Just disappointing. How you can have so much, and then nothing.

"The Autopsy of Jane Doe" cleverly uses as McGuffin the lady who gives name to the film, meanwhile, Øvredal performs us a satisfactory autopsy on the most frightening fears that are on our minds as parasites, which can be synthesized with two succinct words: the unknown. We know absolutely nothing, the only thing we know for sure is that, at any moment, this pendulum of situations can break down. A story with an uncertain ending, but it executes an author film worthy of dithyramb, a work annexed to the best of the last years in terms of horror, a grand guignol proposal as electrifying as unexpected with an exciting 80's aroma that leaves no one indifferent.