Review of The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) by Matt C — 09 Feb 2017

A lot of horror movies come out and a lot of them aren't good. The trailer for The Autopsy of Jane Doe struck me because it looked more contained and original, and on top of that, it looked pretty decent.

So is the movie itself actually good? Well, for a while. Here's a little movie that carries an effective tone and manages to keep its contained scope tied to the unease that it creates with a mystery similar to an old monster-of-the-week episode of The X-Files.

The third act is when the script goes off the rails, though, its reveal and shift in content feeling underdeveloped enough to feel like it's from a different movie, dragging this one down noticeably.

Austin and Tommy Tilden (Emile Hirsch and Brian Cox) are father and son who work together in a morgue. The mother has died two years ago and Austin plans on leaving his dad to do other things, but one day they're delivered an unidentified female corpse simply known for the time being as a Jane Doe.

As they proceed with the autopsy in an effort to determine a cause and manner of death, they discover various abnormalities in the body that verge on impossible and some weird stuff starts happening. It's nicely contained with virtually all of the film taking place in the morgue, and director André Øvredal shoots the area in an effective manner, finding some interesting shots in the space while slowly building tension and confusion, which this movie keeps hand-in-hand, which I enjoyed.

Florescent lighting paired with little natural light and a growing thunderstorm outside gives the movie an intimate feeling similar to that of an old-fashioned ghost story. Hirsch and Cox are decent in their roles but nothing spectacular, but that may have to do with the roles that they're given.

The issues that lie within The Autopsy of Jane Doe have to do with the script, or more specifically what the script eventually becomes. No spoilers here, but most of the problems are in act three. The movie has a few telltale signs of not-amazing writing at first such as a few lines expositional dialogue that feels unnatural, and Øvredal's direction of some scares cheapen them into jump scares, but this is only two or three times.

The sloppiness becomes apparent in the last 25 minutes or so when the mystery starts to become revealed since it-and what it entails and leads to-feels like something from a different script. Some things don't feel like they were earned are led up to, even if they are interesting.

There's also Hirsch's character's girlfriend Emma (Ophelia Lovibond), who is entirely pointless. The Autopsy of Jane Doe takes its interesting premise and runs with it solidly for a good amount of its runtime, but it starts to feel like it's making stuff up as it goes along towards the ending.

Some aspects of plot revelations feel natural while some feel random, and the girlfriend character should have been exorcised to focus on the two-hander nature of the movie--she's solely a quick way to add some characterization to Hirsch's character.

Øvredal finds some efficient ways to shoot the material and slowly mine tension, but when the script starts to feel like a bit of a ramble, the satisfaction that could have been achieved with a few rewrites ends up being some lost potential, albeit with some genuinely good parts leading up to that.

6.5/10, okay, C+, average, etc.