Autopsy. A generous attempt to build an atmospheric horror film which unfortunately does not achieve its aim.
 
Probably when you read this article the few copies of The autopsy of Jane Doe (Italian title: Autopsy) present in very few multiplexes will already be disappeared from circulation. As happens more and more often, our distributors arrived after cinephiles and horror enthusiasts had already seen the film on the usual channels and it is already a miracle that such a film arrived anyway. André Øvredal's new film was preceded by some awards won around the world, by the many positive reviews collected on film criticism sites, as well as by enthusiastic comments from horror fans, and yet, at the risk of being in the minority, it seems to us that so much enthusiasm is mostly unjustified. Autopsy has a great idea and an extraordinary underlying compactness also given by its short duration. Two men, Tommy (Brian Cox) and Austin (Emile Hirsch), father and son respectively; a morgue located under the house of the two and an unknown corpse brought by the police to be dissected by dawn, these are the few elements of a film which is practically based on four actors in total (one of which is the dead woman in question) and a environment only. Øvredal sets himself the ambitious aim of giving life to a psychological horror in which the tension slowly rises, transforming the environment and situations into threats while in the background unresolved conflicts swirl between a son who would like to leave and change his life and his father. In the center is the dead body of Olwen Kelly, as beautiful as it is mysterious, which alone exudes an enigmatic and bewitching aura. At the beginning it would seem like a routine autopsy but as the sectioning progresses, that body reveals more and more sinister details while the atmosphere becomes unhealthy, the radio plays songs that clash with the aseptic environment of the mortuary room and outside. a storm rages which effectively ends up isolating our heroes. As previously mentioned, Øvredal, rather than aiming for the easy scares typical of too many cheap contemporary horror films, focuses everything on the direction, the editing, the environments and the actors, trying to build a perfect mechanism that encloses the spectator together with the protagonists in a crescendo of paranoia and horror. However, it must be acknowledged, only the least savvy spectators will fall into the trap; for fans of the genre it is all too easy to understand where this is going. While Tommy and Austin try to understand the dark past of that body, the viewer has long understood what the true nature of the corpse is. The same goes for some narrative points such as the sequence in which the two are apparently chased by the corpse itself, it is all too easy to guess who will be the victim of the ax blow. The final result is that of a film that starts off very well but which soon runs aground in obvious situations and which perhaps gives too many clues to the viewer with the result that the mystery quickly evaporates, leaving us with a handful of flies in our hands and an unhealthy atmosphere. a sense of what has already been seen, of banal and boredom is replaced. A real shame especially when you consider the effort put into trying to make a film capable of instilling fear with few solid elements as old as the genre itself. Perhaps it was precisely this generous attempt that made many people praise Autopsy, happy to finally have to deal with a horror with an ancient flavor that focused entirely on filmic elements rather than on artfully created scares perhaps with the help of a sound shot ball. In the end we can even be satisfied, after all it is so rare that horror films reach our cinemas, especially when they try to derail the imposed common taste and above all when they present for their entire duration the body of a beautiful naked daughter in the center of the room . That Autopsy survived censorship is already a miracle but this is not enough to lift the film from a strained pass.