The Autopsy of Jane Doe Review (Film, 2016)
Content warning: nudity, surgical footage, gore, violence against women, violence against animals
A note on the content warning: The Autopsy of Jane Doe deals with the autopsy of a young woman found naked in a basement. As people investigate her body, they discover signs of trauma and speculate on how she may have been abused. We never see the acts of violence against her (or the cat later in the film), but the results are shown and discussed. -Robert J Gannon
Director André Øvredal (Trollhunter, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark) has a lot of calling cards as a director. He has a very expressive style, relying on setting, camera angle, and sound to tell his story. He loves to plant the seed of an idea very early on that pays off in the final act. More than anything, he plays with genre, mashing unexpected styles together in novel ways.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is medical/body horror, haunted house, home invasion, and thriller combined in one effective horror story. Austin works for his father Tommy in the family morgue. He’s about to leave for a night out with his girlfriend Emma when Sheriff Burke wheels a body into the facility. It is Jane Doe, an unidentified female found in the basement of a violent crime scene with no external markings of trauma.
Once Austin and Tommy begin the examination to determine a cause of death, they discover nothing about the case makes sense. The body can move freely, but the eyes are gray like a much older corpse. Bones are broken with no bruising on the outside. Jane Doe bleeds like her body is still pumping blood, but nothing about her is alive. Tommy swears he’s seen these and many other unusual elements before, but Austin is convinced from the start that something is terribly wrong.
Emile Hirsch (Austin) and Brian Cox (Tommy) anchor The Autopsy of Jane Doe in a wonderful sense of realism. They pair up well as father in son, sharing many of the same mannerisms and expressions in their everyday actions. Their conflict is inter-generational on many levels—father and son, teacher and student, professional and apprentice—as they live and work together in the family business. Austin’s interests lie elsewhere, which is clear from his constant need to speculate on motivation for death/murder rather than focus on a provable medical cause of death. Hirsch and Cox have believable tension over this, but match energy and passion over their approach and interpretation in every scene. It’s perfect casting that allows the viewer to acclimate themselves to the unusual circumstances happening around them.
Screenwriters Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing get away with a surprising amount of narration because of the relationship between the characters. Tommy is teaching Austin about the nuances of working as a medical examiner in a morgue, giving Goldberg and Naing a lot of leeway with how much the characters are allowed to literally discuss what they are doing in a specific moment. They set up the hows and whys of investigating cause of death by having Tommy review procedures and methods with Austin as they investigate two bodies in the film (the first being literally wrapped up before Jane Doe enters the scene).
By the time the film strays into straight up haunted house territory, the film’s conditioned the audience to expect simple explanations for everything. Those stop coming once Tommy doesn’t know what’s happening anymore. Austin’s experience is purely speculative, and nothing he suggests can ever be confirmed.
This, in turn, allows Øvredal to do what he does best: build tension through unexpected shifts in visual and narrative style for psychological horror. This film, more so than his other features, veers from genre to genre with no warning. It works surprisingly well. By the time you get your bearings when new information changes the course of the story, you’re thrown into another unexpected style of horror. Perhaps the most impressive part is how all these little twists and turns are cleanly laid out in the first few moments of the film and set aside until just the right moment.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is a wonderfully adventurous horror film. The mix of genres pushes it into experimental film territory without losing sight of the throughline. We will find out what happened to Jane Doe because, as Tommy says, when we start something, we finish it.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is currently streaming on Netflix and IFC Unlimited.
