Too many horror movies collapse under the weight of their own strong premises. They start out confidently with an intriguing idea and a good set up, only to veer off somewhere in the middle, leaving you to wonder what went wrong. Like 2012’s Sinister, The Autopsy of Jane Doe presents a strong opener and a perfect setting, only to let the supernatural elements lead it into awfully familiar mainstream horror territory.
Though it shares similar structural problems with Sinister, director André Øvredal’s supernatural body horror flick has a tone and setting more in line with Reanimator (1985): Father and son coroners Tommy and Austin Tilden (Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch), receive an anonymous homicide victim (played by Olwen Catherine Kelly) late at night. Austin is supposed to go out with his girlfriend, but he stays to help his widowed father with the body. Together they unearth one disturbing, contradictory clue after the other—Jane Doe’s tongue is cut out, her lungs are blackened and her ankles and wrists are shattered, yet her skin shows no sign of trauma.
The autopsy scenes work tremendously well. The practical effects are joyously repulsive and the characters, especially Brian Cox as the more seasoned coroner, treat the organs in a workmanlike, blasé fashion, nicely contrasting the audience’s repulsion. Each discovery inside the body adds to the mystery and makes for compelling viewing, but when the reveal comes, everything kind of goes haywire. Suddenly, instead of a chilling chamber mystery, Jane Doe relies on repetitive jump scares occupied by a jolting violin score and plodding backstories that fail to add insight into the characters.
The one element that holds the film together amid all the chaos is, surprisingly, Kelly’s dead-still performance as the enigmatic corpse. The actress reportedly studied yoga in order to lie still for hours at a time. Every shot of her cloudy eyes and expressionless gaze is chilling. Her physicality (or perhaps the lack of it?) makes every autopsy scene work. In between two pretty unremarkable performances by otherwise reliable actors, Kelly plays perfectly the role of suspicious dead body. It’s just a shame the film isn’t as consistent as its most committed player.
– Tom
Tom Bensley is a freelance writer in Melbourne who reviews anything he attends, watches or reads. It’s a compulsion, really. Follow him @TomAliceBensley.
Monster Fest took place from the 24-27 November 2016 at Lido Cinemas, Melbourne.
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