Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Father and son coroners receive a mysterious unidentified corpse with no apparent cause of death. As they attempt to examine the "Jane Doe," they discover increasingly bizarre clues that hold the key to her terrifying secrets.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe is a remarkably original horror film that earns its distinctiveness through a supremely clever high-concept premise — confining the entire film to a morgue and building dread through the procedural mechanics of an autopsy. André Øvredal extracts extraordinary tension from a genuinely novel framework. Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch deliver performances well above the genre norm, with Cox in particular grounding the supernatural escalation in authentic, measured craft. The cinematography is competent and atmospheric but largely functional rather than visually exceptional — the confined setting is used well but not transcendently. The plot is inventive in its first two acts, using autopsy discoveries as horror reveals in a genuinely fresh way, though the mythology explanation slightly deflates the mystery it builds. The ending is the film's weakest link — the resolution feels abrupt and somewhat unsatisfying, trading the carefully built dread for a rushed denouement that doesn't fully honour the intrigue that preceded it.