The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
Directed by: André Øvredal
Rated: R
This is the same old horror movie, two people trapped in the cellar of a morgue with living corpses, some supernatural elements and a few jump scares. For instance, the idea that a modern coroner still ties bells to the toes of his cadavers like they did in the Victorian era, is poorly contrived to give audiences that frisson of horror when they hear a bell tinkling its way down the hall.
What stands out is the base premise. It is the mystery of a woman’s corpse found in near perfect condition buried in a cellar. The dialogue doesn’t give you much in the way of solid explanation. You need to listen carefully and let it sink in. (The prologue story doesn’t really make sense, so don’t over-think it.)
The body reveals secrets layer by layer as the skilled coroners dissect her. Eventually they determine that the body isn’t dead.
“She’s felt every bit of it.”
The nameless (and likely originally innocent) woman from 1736 has been tortured, poisoned, (causing paralysis,) and “killed” by multiple mortal means; bound, her tongue cut out, her privates violated and mangled (savage physical torture as only Puritanical witch-hunters could devise,) her organs stabbed, then she was finally burned. But her body, is ever slowly, slowly healing itself. Because she cannot truly die.
What Tommy, the experienced undertaker, hypothesizes is that those who tortured her, through their pompous, fabricated magickal ritual, ended up unwittingly creating exactly what they most wanted to rid themselves of: a witch.
The family cat is also discovered dead, mauled by a wild animal, for the sake of offering a precedent for a mercy killing, (a key to the end sequence). They just had to kill the pet. But it does fit the plot; it offers an in to the backstory of the characters. The main character’s assistant and apprentice is his son Austin, who surprisingly doesn’t want to follow in Dad’s footsteps to inherit the family business. The mortician’s wife has committed suicide (he “lost her to depression”,) and the cat, as a symbol of all he had left of her, becomes an excuse for the minimal plot extrapolation as he further sets up the ending with a soliloquy about the son paying the price for the “sins of the father”.
The witch begins her game of retribution by trapping the mortician and his son in an illusion, clued by the change in the radio broadcasts from sunny days ahead to a rain storm that “you don’t want to get caught in.” They try to torch the body unsuccessfully. The witch focuses her physical attack on the old man because it was his hand that cut her body.
In a nice piece of foreshadowing, we are shown how outward appearance isn’t always the actual “cause” of death, but something that came later. We know the woman’s body was tortured, but what was the ultimate, original “CoD”? Maybe that will be the ticket to their release.
