When it comes to crafting a horror film, sometimes the hook of the basic story is almost as important as the finished film itself as a good concept – and I mean a really good concept – ends up doing the most of the heavy lifting. This brings us to André Øvredal’s The Autopsy Of Jane Doe, a flick that comes with a basic story so intriguing, so creepy, so haunting, it gave the director his first feature since making the magnificent Toll Hunter six long years ago.
Essentially a twist on the old haunted house theme that shifts the action to an old funeral home and switches out your traditional brand of ghoulies for a pristine corpse that seems to make bad shit go down, Jane Doe allowed its director to unleash some familiar terrors while coming up with a whole new reason behind it that feels new and fresh as the disturbingly unmarked body that takes centre stage. Stock up on the Pepto Bismol, we’re about to plunge into The Autopsy Of Jane Doe right up to our elbows.
A truly baffling murder stuns the sheriff of a small town as the more he walks around the crime scene, the more unanswerable questions spring up like voracious weeds. However, while multiple bodies, no sign of forced entry and the fact that everyone was seemingly trying to escape but somehow couldn’t is troubling enough, the real head scratcher is the half buried body of an unidentified girl lurking in the basement. Desperately needing answers, law enforcement have the naked, unmarked body sent to a local coroner in order to determine cause of death and stresses that they need an answer by the morning.
It’s here that father and son coroner team Tommy and Austin Tilden take over as the former rolls up his sleeves for a long night and the latter takes a raincheck on a date with his girlfriend, Emma, in order to stay and help his dad as they probe the remains of this mysterious Jane Doe. Of course, both father and son have their own, hidden issues; Tommy is still barely over the death of his wife, while Austin has been planning to leave town with Emma for a while now, but still hasn’t worked up the courage to tell his old man yet – however, both these issues soon fall by the wayside as their autopsy soon takes a bizarre turn.
Despite Jane Doe’s body being virtually unmarked despite having the grey, dead pupils of a corpse being dead a long time, blood is still flowing in her veins and there’s absolutely no sign of rigor mortis or even the slightest hint of decomposition, which suggest that she only just died. Even weirder, when they start opening her up, they find her lungs are a charred, blackened mess which suggests she somehow died in a fire and her organs all bare the criss cross marks of scar tissue which suggest she was stabbed. But if all this is true, how is her body so perfect and unsullied? Soon, both father and son find themselves in a supernatural pickle that’ll make them wish they were rather performing the colonoscopy of Piers Morgan rather than the autopsy of Jane Doe.
So be honest, I genuinely believe that The Autopsy Of Jane Doe has probably one of the best set ups for a horror film in the last twenty years as it takes the basic parameters of a good old fashioned ghost story (weird occuences, old house, a puzzle to solve the haunting) and amps it with some funky, Lovecraftian vibes that prove to make the basic premise thoroughly gripping. In fact, you can tell that Øvredal is just as excited to get stuck into the titular autopsy as we are in order to peel away the layers of this freaky conundrum and start delivering creepy results.
The nature of an autopsy in a horror film is an art form that is required to bring together gooey special effects and a whole bunch of exposition in order to painstakingly explain to the audience exactly how the nasty stuff actually works. Over time, their has been some great ones; The Thing had Wilford Brimley spelling out how the alien duplicates it’s prey, Blade II gave us an in depth look at how the Reaper vampires worked and in David Fincher’s Se7en, we got a plethora of gruesome walk throughs detailing the miserable end of some of John Doe’s victims – but here we have something new. Here we have virtually a whole film where two dudes cut up a body in order to figure out what gnarly shit has gone down and the film works overtime to try and make the premise reach its full potential.
While the film is essentially a three person show (if you count the prone form of a clothes-free Olwen Catherine Kelly at the titular corpse), the main heavy lifting is done by the always dependable Brian Cox as Tommy Tilden who not only has to deliver the lion’s share of the explanations, but he has to do it while rummaging around in the torso of some truly superlative special effects that portray the insides of a human body with squirm inducing accuracy. Backing him up is Emile Hirsch as the dutiful son who is having the urge to leave the small town with Ophelia Lovibond’s love interest but as the Tilden’s start unravelling their human-shaped puzzle, things start to get pretty weird.
The gradual discovery of more outlandish and impossible injuries to the body prove to deliver the majority of the creeps as the two morticians uncover evidence that simply refuses make logical sense and the more weird shit they discover, the more invested in the mystery you get. Also, with the film’s dependence on dead bodies to carry the morbid tone, the feeling of near chewable dread is overwhelming as the story is obsessed with mortality much like the morgue set antics of Re-Animator, or Nightwatch.
However, I have to say, while this whole Clive Barker meets Agatha Christie thing works extremely well for the first half, like almost every other movie that hinges its plot on the unexplainable, the second it starts to explain itself, the unsettling tone of the film inevitably switches to something far more familiar. While the explanation that Jane Doe met her gruesome end while being tried as a witch back in 1693 is fascinating in its own right, the usual string of malfunctioning radios, eerie noises and shuffling figures in the shadows are unleashed to pad out the second half. While Øvredal still manages to keep the chills coming, the more traditional scares simply aren’t as riveting as the opening autopsy and there’s also a surprising lack of drama between father and son as the fact that Austin is planing to leave is never actually brought up with his dad.
However, that first half is more than enough to help the movie stay the course and once again, props have to be given to Kelly who probably gives the finest, all-nude performance in a horror film since Mathilda May in Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce (if you’re keeping score of stuff like that). Yes, that second half let’s the team down slightly and they’re times when you feel that the concept might have worked better as a 40 minute episode of an anthology horror show, but for its concept alone, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe is one unsettling creepshow that certainly proves that it’s what truly inside that counts.
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