Film Review: The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

Photo courtesy of the IMDb. Sometimes, dead is better.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), directed by Andre Ovredal, starring Brian Cox, Emile Hirsch, and Ophelia Lovibond.

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This is a low-budget, indie horror from the U. K., made by the director of the Norwegian dark fantasy hit, Trollhunter (2011). This film transcends its limited budget and narrow settings, resulting in a satisfyingly creepy tale with an original premise.

The film opens with a sheriff’s team investigating the brutal murders of a family in their home. The setting is in rural Virginia. While searching the premises of the murder house, the team finds the nude body of a young woman half-buried in the basement, apparently unrelated to the killings upstairs. The body does not show any decay and has no marks on it.

The sheriff dumps off all the bodies at the county morgue and crematorium, which is run by a father-and-son team named Tommy (Cox) and Austin (Hirsch) Tilden. The morgue is in a gloomy, old Victorian house converted to institutional use. The sheriff wants a complete autopsy report on the unidentified young woman, renamed Jane Doe, by morning.

Tommy agrees, even though it means working far into the night to meet the deadline. Austin had planned a night out with his girlfriend Emma (Lovibond), but postpones the date to help his father.

As they begin the autopsy, the two men notice strange things about the body of Jane Doe. There’s no lividity or rigor mortis in the body. All of her wrists and ankles have been broken, but no bruises or contusions are visible externally. Her tongue has been ripped out. Her internal organs bear the marks of stabbings and severe burning, but again, externally there are no signs of trauma. Eventually, they find signs that Jane Doe may have been tortured to death in a religious ritual meant to suppress witchcraft.

While Tommy and Austin grimly proceed with the autopsy, odd events keep manifesting in the creepy old morgue. The radio turns itself on, and keeps playing a song called Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sunshine In, which counsels children to keep the devil away by smiling and being cheerful. (Ironic, since it’s Jane Doe who is literally being “opened up.”)

Doors open themselves, and strange, vaguely Satanic noises emanate from old air vents. When Austin opens one of the noisy air vents, he finds the family cat, mangled and near death. Austin wants to leave, but Tommy doggedly insists on finishing the autopsy.

By the time things get so weird and frightening that even Tommy wants to bail on the autopsy, it’s too late. The two men are trapped in the morgue with all doors blocked, and various occupants of the drawers have freed themselves and are lurching, zombie like, after them. They decide to incinerate Jane Doe’s corpse in a desperate attempt to stop the threatening manifestations, but it won’t burn. Instead, the fire they set incinerates all the photos and videotapes that Tommy and Austin took of the autopsy.

The Scottish character actor Cox turns in a very strong performance as the crusty but likable Tommy, and Hirsch is good as the dutiful, gee-whiz son. Ovredal moves the action along with a sure hand, adding in a string of false jumps and then delivering a kill shot just as the audience is disarmed.

At the end, a lot of questions about Jane Doe are left for the viewers to figure out for themselves, based on plenty of previous cues, in contrast to many modern horror films where everything is explained ad nauseam. The autopsy scenes are graphic and detailed, and the squeamish should be forewarned; I hit the pause button myself several times when the rib-spreading and skull-cutting really switched into gear.

Overall, Jane Doe is worth your time, especially for viewers who like equal parts of slow-burn ghosters leavened with graphic gore. On disc and currently streaming on Netflix. I give Jane Doe a solid 7/10.