The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

In 2010 a gaggle of monsters that hadn't been considered 'scary' in a long time came crashing out of Norway in the form of found-footage hit Trollhunter, the most profitable film to come out of that particular frostbitten country in history. It would be a full six years before director Andre "Name With a Bunch of Accent Marks I Can't Replicate Unless I Reset My Keyboard to Norwegian Which I'm Not Gonna Do" Ovredal would release another film, this time in English, and while it couldn't be more different in tone and style from Trollhunter, I'm pleased to say The Autopsy of Jane Doe is just as impressive in it's own right.

We start off following a sheriff arriving at a home that also happens to be the sight of a grizzly triple homicide in which it appears all the victims died desperately trying to leave the house. But that's not the strangest thing; that would go to the partially uncovered body of an anonymous young woman --our titular Jane Doe-- in the dirt-floor basement. She's taken to the local funeral home, run by a father/son combo, both of whom are still grieving from the wife/mother's death two years before, for the procedure of the title. They open her to find shattered wrists and ankles, dozens of lacerations on her internal organs, and lungs like she inhaled enough smoke to smother four or five people, yet there are no indicators of any injury whatsoever outside. Far from it, her skin is alabaster perfection. Then, things start to get weird, with hallucinations, dead animals, and a very clear link to the occult.

Gone is the found footage aesthetic and all it's trappings of Trollhunter (though don't let the found footage thing scare you off from watching that film if you hate that style, because as April Snellings wrote in a review of the film it "owes more to Jurassic Park than The Blair Witch Project"), and in its place is an assured, fluid camera and careful lighting that recalls an antiseptic version of the gothic works of Terrence Fisher. Whereas Trollhunter wanted you to oogle over the titular creatures in all their glory, Autopsy is somewhat secretive, with very few on-screen special effects --except for the actual autopsy stuff, of course.

As far as acting goes, it's actually kind of amazing the best performance in the entire film is given by Olwen Catherine Kelly, who plays the corpse at the center of the mystery. Don't get me wrong, the other actors are fine; Emile Hirsch pulls off the idea of a character who wants to leave the situation he's in but doesn't know how to say it, and, frankly, I might have a little bit of a crush on Brian Cox and think he's wonderful in everything, but there's just some type of magnetism Jane Doe has that forces your eye to her every time. The minute changes to her facial expressions depending on what's going on in the scene make her feel almost more alive than any of the other characters whom are all stuck in the past in their own ways.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm a fan of this Norse master of genre cinema and you should definable check out both films discussed here.