The Autopsy of Jane Doe

Good idea, great execution and moderate runtime that helps the atmosphere, thanks to which the viewer does not get bored. Ugly, a mystery, an autopsy, corpses, darkness, a thunderstorm... ask yourself who could resist such a horror invitation, right? Ummm.... Certainly, some of the jump scares were predictable to cheap, but there were also moments that, I think, no one expected, and the gradual unraveling of the whole mystery was very entertaining to me. Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch are great. (12/29/2018)

A superb example that horror isn't dead and it's still possible to create original and intriguing films that have that precise unsettling and eerie atmosphere you expect, and it's achieved here solely through one enclosed space and three actors, one of whom lies motionless on the autopsy table throughout. Brian Fox and Emile Hirsch are excellent. (07/03/2017)

I hope André Øvredal will start working at a faster pace, because I don’t want to wait another six years for his next genre piece. Both of his films so far, Troll Hunter and now The Autopsy of Jane Doe, are great examples of how to bring something original to the horror genre. They aren’t revolutionary game-changers, rather, they slightly alter and playfully appropriate templates, which is more than enough. On top of that, this film is directed with a firm hand, the camera navigates the interiors of the morgue with grace, and some sequences are text-book examples of how to create tension and horror scenes. The characters are likeable and don’t behave too stupidly, and the core mystery manages to reliably arouse and maintain the curiosity. I won’t pretend the film doesn’t have any weak elements (for me, it was the reveal, when the characters suddenly unravel the mystery and everything is explained to the viewer – IMHO, it would have been better to just tap on the details and let the viewers figure things out for themselves), but overall I’m very satisfied. (12/21/2016)

I waited the entire time for the final ultra-shock, such as that I got from, for example, the Spanish movie [REC], but it never came. I waited for it because the director managed to delicately escalate the horror-like tension to the point that viewers could feel it in the marrow of their bones. The A-list acting duo gives the movie some prestige, you can smell the stench of dead bodies in the morgue from each shot, and the unmoving, soulful look of actress Olwen Catherine Kelly will haunt you for long hours after you’ve finished watching. It’s a pity that the logic of the plot suffered. With a better script, this could have been the best horror movie of 2016. (01/10/2017)

This is a filmed handbook for aspiring horror filmmakers. Øvredal sticks to tradition like a pathologist to a scalpel. He knows where the line between light and shadow lies, and at the same time he has a clear idea that even if you routinely cut into corpses for a couple of decades, you're still a person with a distinctive character at your core. We get all this for at least the first hour. The final twenty minutes are very clumsy, both in the denouement and in the presentation, where I would have cut down on the literalness of the images and the biblical quotations. It was still fairly decent, though. (01/15/2017)