The Autopsy of Jane Doe

Film - 2016

7,0

124.6K

The Autopsy of Jane Doe it's a movie with Emile Hirsch, Brian Cox, Ophelia Lovibond, Olwen Catherine Kelly, Michael McElhatton Full cast. Directed by André Øvredal. Original title The Autopsy of Jane Doe, runtime 86 minutes. Genres Horror, Mystery.

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Review of

Emiliano Baglio

Autopsy. A generous attempt to build an atmospheric horror that unfortunately does not achieve its goal. Probably by the time you read this article the few copies of The autopsy of Jane Doe (Italian title: Autopsy) present in very few multiplexes will have already 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 increasingly sinister details while the atmosphere becomes Read all

Interesting but a prisoner of its initial idea of

Bongo

The film describes the autopsy of a woman with an unknown identity (a generic "Jane Doe" in fact) and the sinister events that follow. In itself the idea is interesting, but in fact the film remains a sort of documentary of a 'autopsy, in the sense that in my opinion the clinical investigation could have taken up a much shorter time, even at the cost of sacrificing a bit of splatter and leaving room for a greater development of the woman's story, which remains only outlined in broad terms . Unfortunately, this is not the only flaw I found in the screenplay, which is at times a little incomplete (and easily predictable for the most astute spectators). I know it was well received by critics and objectively it's not bad, but I feel like it wasted a lot of potential. What I liked: The actors, credible and good even when the script didn't help them The sets, realistic and distressing The atmosphere of the film, rather claustrophobic What I didn't like: The story, in some points devoid of logical sense: difficult to explain without spoiling the film, but for one thing in the whole film it is never explained how Jane Doe ended up in the place where she is found at the beginning (the medical examiner and her son understand that she died elsewhere, but this detail is completely useless for narrative purposes, the whole story could have been set there and best regards) nor, which is surreal, how she died considering that ***SPOILER*** the girl actually survived the fire, the poisoning, the ' stabbing etc etc but somehow she ended up dead. As? boh. The excessive weight given to the autopsy compared to the story: I agree that the film is called "autopsy", but it could have been a starting point, not a long series of splatter effects that soon become repetitive and boring Read all

plot

Father and son coroners receive a mysterious unidentified corpse with no apparent cause of death. As they attempt to examine the "Jane Doe," they discover increasingly bizarre clues that hold the key to her terrifying secrets.