Directed by:
André ØvredalCinematography:
Roman OsinCast:
Brian Cox, Emile Hirsch, Olwen Catherine Kelly, Ophelia Lovibond, Michael McElhatton, Mark Badham, Parker Sawyers, Jane PerryPlots(1)
Coroner Tommy Tilden and son Austin run a morgue and crematorium in Virginia. When the local sheriff brings in a body found in the basement of a home, it seems like just another open-and-shut case. As the autopsy proceeds however, they are left reeling as the inspection brings new revelations. Perfectly preserved on the outside, Jane Doe seems to have been the victim of a horrific ritualistic torture. Tommy and Austin begin to piece together these gruesome discoveries, as an unnatural force takes hold of the crematorium. (Showtime)
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Reviews (9)
The first "forensic" half in the style of "conversations at the autopsy table" is very fresh and exciting, the second begins to use on more familiar genre tropes and uses shabby jump scares. Exchanges of views between father and son are sometimes engulfed by rigor mortis, and the final revelation is not exactly from the "what you don't hear about every Halloween" category, but the rather skillful directing and good atmosphere push it through the kiln door with triumph. André Øvredal did not disappoint, just another crunchy story, this time sprinkled with formaldehyde and conducted in a sharp sagittal spirit. By the way, it's a movie that awakens the necrophile in someone. A little bit.
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I waited the entire time for the final ultra-shock, such as that I got from, for example, the Spanish movie [REC], but it
never came. I waited for it because the director managed to delicately escalate the horror-like tension to the point that
viewers could feel it in the marrow of their bones. The A-list acting duo gives the movie some prestige, you can smell the
stench of dead bodies in the morgue from each shot, and the unmoving, soulful look of actress Olwen Catherine Kelly
will haunt you for long hours after you’ve finished watching. It’s a pity that the logic of the plot suffered. With a better
script, this could have been the best horror movie of 2016.
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This is a filmed handbook for aspiring horror filmmakers. Øvredal sticks to tradition like a pathologist to a scalpel. He knows where the line between light and shadow lies, and at the same time he has a clear idea that even if you routinely cut into corpses for a couple of decades, you're still a person with a distinctive character at your core. We get all this for at least the first hour. The final twenty minutes are very clumsy, both in the denouement and in the presentation, where I would have cut down on the literalness of the images and the biblical quotations. It was still fairly decent, though.
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A superb example that horror isn't dead and it's still possible to create original and intriguing films that have that precise unsettling and eerie atmosphere you expect, and it's achieved here solely through one enclosed space and three actors, one of whom lies motionless on the autopsy table throughout. Brian Fox and Emile Hirsch are excellent.
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I hope André Øvredal will start working at a faster pace, because I don’t want to wait another six years for his next genre piece. Both of his films so far, Troll Hunter and now The Autopsy of Jane Doe, are great examples of how to bring something original to the horror genre. They aren’t revolutionary game-changers, rather, they slightly alter and playfully appropriate templates, which is more than enough. On top of that, this film is directed with a firm hand, the camera navigates the interiors of the morgue with grace, and some sequences are text-book examples of how to create tension and horror scenes. The characters are likeable and don’t behave too stupidly, and the core mystery manages to reliably arouse and maintain the curiosity. I won’t pretend the film doesn’t have any weak elements (for me, it was the reveal, when the characters suddenly unravel the mystery and everything is explained to the viewer – IMHO, it would have been better to just tap on the details and let the viewers figure things out for themselves), but overall I’m very satisfied.
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