Movie Review : The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
There's a fine line between local gossip and urban legends. One is dishonest, the other is deemed folkloric. Both are unlikely to be untrue and serve one purpose: making life more interesting than it really is. Reframe events through the prism of an arbitrary assigned meaning for our own sense of purpose, amusement or whatever it is that makes people talk shit. Contemporary horror classic The Autopsy of Jane Doe gracefully surfs that line with another, nastier purpose in mind: freaking you the hell out.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe tells the story of a local mortician (played by arthouse icon Brian Cox) and his son (Hollywood castoff Emile Hirsch) who are tasked with finding the cause of death of a body found half-buried in the basement of an unrelated murder scene. The body of the unnamed young woman (Olwen Kelly) shows signs of extreme violence and other inexplicable clues (like a flower in her lung). But it's not what happened to her that matters. It's what's gonna happen to her unsuspecting examiners.
Being Alone in the Dark
This movie has two personalities. It presents itself to be this dorky, campy ReAnimator-like film about a mortician working out of the basement of his gargantuan, predatory Gothic house of all places. There's this great scene at the start where Brian Cox's character shows a dead body to his son's girlfriend and that body has a tiny bell wrapped around her big toe. The mortician explains that it's a tradition in his profession, dating from the era where you were never really sure whether people are really dead or not.
Right, like that innocent, light-hearted sound is not going to be weaponized against us later. You’re not fooling anyone, doc.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is filled with silly, silly stuff like dead people coming back to life and strolling through poorly lit hallways, radio hosts that seem like they talk directly to characters and whatnot. It should be laugh out loud funny at times, but it isn’t. No, director André Øvredal makes it work through the film’s other personality : the mean spirited older brother around the campfire. The one that doesn’t want you around, so he tries to terrify you until you cry in order to entertain his friends.
This is where The Autopsy of Jane Doe transform into the most terrifying episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? that was never made. For the first half of the movie, you're exposed to signifiers of supernatural events but you're never confronted to supernatural events themselves: you hear a toetag bell ring, you see blood seeping through a refrigerator door, there’s the shadow of a reanimated corpse coming from under a door, but you never see the corpse itself. None of it might be actually happening.
Being alone in the dark will make your brain scramble for scary stuff. It will make you assign meaning to a seemingly unrelated series of events against your best judgement in order to make sense of them. You never know if the mortician and his son are being actually spellbound, trapped in a netherworld or going insane trying to piece together a series of clues that simply don't add up. The Autopsy of Jane Doe uses every campy convention in horror movies and weaponizes it against you.
Storytelling 201 and Economy of Language
If The Autopsy of Jane Doe is so good at being scary, smart and campy at the same time, it's because it is quite adept at saying a lot with very little. Co-writers Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing have created a story where most of the important details are delivered in a non-verbal manner. Namely on (and inside) the body of the titular Jane Doe. She has a story written on her body that our two protagonists are trying to wrap together like two gossipy old men who really trying to freak each other out.
This is a film about myth and how it influences and bleeds into reality. Through a story the mortician and his son gradually construct, reality around them start changing and influencing their well-being. Of course, it is highly metaphorical, but the best horror movies work when they're deconstructing something real and this is very much the case here. We live in an era where people dramatically alter their lives based on stories they tell themselves. That is why The Autopsy of Jane Doe feels so crushingly efficient.
*
Prior to being made independently (and thoroughly forgotten by 99% of the population), The Autopsy of Jane Doe was featured on The Black List survey of the best screenplays that were not already produced and rightfully so. It’s a smart, multifaceted movie that never falls into the trap of trying to overexplain or freak you out more than you could freak yourself out. It’s a movie that understand how to be scary. Because the scariest stories are the stories we tell ourselves, about the things we’re afraid of.
