Review of The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) by Nikolayg — 05 May 2017

This first half of this movie is mostly a father and son talking as they go about conducting an autopsy on a 20-something young woman. So what you get are two actors and an attractive woman lying naked on a table - with no attempts made at all to hide it; so the movie is full of the most unusual nudity you can think of- in the most unsexy circumstances possible. In most stories the characters engage in a lot of physical activity and move from one setting to another. It's a risk for a movie to limit itself to one setting and use only a couple of characters as this one does. There are more actors but their time in the movie is very limited. It's almost exclusively these two guys. If you think you can't deal with such a movie, don't watch this. But when I saw the trailer I was hooked. The young woman was found in a home where all the residents had been murdered. But she wasn't a resident. And she was found naked half buried in dirt in the basement; she was not killed while going about her business doing something normal in the house like the residents of the house were. As they do the autopsy they start to find weird stuff in her body, and the situation gets weirder from there. I would have given it more stars if not for a few big errors. Something very terrible happens, after which the father starts talking about the mistakes he made regarding his wife and how the son suffered due to that. This is fine to give the story some emotional depth, but it's the wrong moment. It doesn't work. What has just happened was too terrible. The father wouldn't have chosen that moment to say these things. They should have found a way to work it in before the terrible event. In fact, the way the two characters carry on after this event - within 10 minutes they're having conversation as if this event didn't happen - is totally unrealistic. Of course, the events of the movie are crazy due to the genre - but the way people react should be realistic. The ending is kind of cool but there's no reason it couldn't have happened earlier, much earlier, right at the start, in fact. And what the son does near the end - is also unbelievable. Also, one more problem, is that something that seemed to be happening, which seemed to be the ultimate point, did not happen; the ending would have been much better if it had. So I give the movie points for originality, but a couple of major missteps that could have been avoided if they'd just worked on the script some more, take it down to a 6.

But be warned, really scary.