The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

This review assumes the reader has watched the film, and thus contains spoilers. I recommend watching the movie blind first, because the way the mystery develops and unfolds is a lot of fun.

I'll begin by going through the structure of the film. The way the mystery of what happened to Jane Doe and who she is progresses is very well done, beat-for-beat. I'll break the plot down into five parts to go through the pacing of the story. All five parts are almost exactly the right length to hold the viewer's attention and get across the narrative and the horror elements. None of them feel too short, and only part three feels a little too long, but that part contains the majority of the horror elements.

First is the exposition: we're introduced first to Jane Doe under mysterious circumstances, and then to the father-and-son coroners under exceedingly normal circumstances, and then the coroners are introduced to Jane Doe. The exposition is just enough to establish the characters and setting properly without taking up too much of the time of the narrative. (I think the characters are actually medical examiners -- coroners tend not to have full medical training and don't usually do the autopsies themselves -- but they call themselves coroners in the film, so that's how I'll refer to them in this review.)

The second part is the introduction of the mystery. The coroners do the external examination of the body and begin the internal examination before being interrupted by the storm. The mystery of the story truly begins when the autopsy begins. It's introduced slowly, with the pieces being placed on the table but not put together. The coroners offer early assumptions of what the puzzle they're putting together could look like -- human trafficking. The pacing of going through the body and finding stranger and stranger things, observations of increasing impossibility, is perfect. These clues point to something supernatural, but don't necessarily have to lead there, especially from the point of view of the characters.

Next is the development of danger. Jane Doe doesn't want to have an autopsy done on her, and here we start to see that she'll do anything in her power to stop it. This is when the dead begin to walk. Having introduced the dead bodies at the beginning makes this even more impactful because of the anticipation of seeing the bodies "alive" and walking around -- the woman with her mouth sewn shut, the man with the gunshot wound. The bells attached to the corpses also do a fantastic job of building anticipation. When you hear the bell ring, you know exactly what's happening, and so do the characters. This is the true "scary" element of the film: the dead walking around, trying to hurt you, and nowhere to run. But man, do the coroners run.

At this point, the characters have deduced that it's Jane Doe causing all of this, and the son decides the only way to stop it is to finish the autopsy and determine the cause of death. Solve the mystery. Here all the clues finally come together. It's not quite something you could have figured out before the characters did, because not all the pieces fit together until now, but it makes perfect sense that this is what all the clues had been leading to this whole time. And here, not only do they solve the mystery, but they help Jane Doe achieve what she's wanted these few hundred years, letting her take out her revenge on the father.

The ending is just as well done as the beginning. Jane Doe returns to her pristine condition, and the cops are once again confounded by the violence that's occurred around her. And as she lays in the back of the van, we hear the song come on the radio, and we know she's not done. But now that she's gotten her revenge, what is she going to do? We see her move, with the ring of a bell, perfectly calling back to the fear from part three and implying that now, she'll be able to walk, herself.

Let's discuss the deaths in the film apart from Jane Doe herself, starting with the minor characters. I didn't like the son's girlfriend much, personally, but I think she was necessary to the exposition to establish the coroners' personalities and their relationship to each other. I don't think she necessarily had to die, since she just got caught in Jane Doe's crossfire, but it did drive home for the son what was really happening -- that Jane Doe was trying to kill them. The other significant death was that of the cat, which I don't think needed to happen. There was no narrative purpose for it apart from upsetting the characters, which is a horror element, but isn't nearly as significant of a horror element as those that appear in part three of the story. It helps build the sense of foreboding, but I don't find it to be worth much more than shock value. The cat itself wasn't quite necessary to the narrative, so neither was its death.

I had mixed feelings about the deaths of the coroners. The father's death was obviously the natural conclusion to the story and the solution to the main problem the characters were facing, but I have other thoughts about the son's death. The first time I watched the movie, I was frustrated with it, because he almost made it out. He survived everything Jane Doe put him through, and then he fell off a landing and died on impact. After my most recent rewatch, though, I think this was also a natural conclusion to the story. What had frustrated me about it the first time was the futility of it all, but I think that's an essential part of the ending -- that we don't know when Jane Doe is going to stop. The most important consideration of the purpose of the son's death from a narrative standpoint is Jane Doe's perspective. She didn't want him to live to tell the tale of what happened that night -- if he had lived, her secret would have been out. The way it ended, she's free to travel from grave to ME's office to funeral home and back again, exacting her revenge upon as many people as she sees fit.

(As an undertaker, it was also fun to watch because the body is in such pristine condition externally, and returns to its original pristine external condition at the end of the film. Medical examiners and coroners have so little regard for what the body looks like when they're done with it that they often make it actively harder to return the body to a presentable state, but in the movie, the body returns to a presentable state when they're done with it. At the cost of the coroners' lives, of course, but it's just a movie.)

In reviewing this movie, I feel I should try to measure its merit as a horror film. It's a fun movie, yes, but how does it rank within the horror genre? The elements I consider when thinking of it as a horror film are the effectiveness of the horror elements, how scary it is in the moment and how much it sticks with you after you watch it as a subset of its effectiveness, how well the narrative holds up apart from the horror elements or how entangled they are in the narrative, and how simply enjoyable it is to watch.

We can begin with the effectiveness of the horror elements. This film is primarily, I think, a mystery story. There are three base human fears the narrative plays on: fear of the unknown, fear of the unpredictable, and fear of the distorted human body.

The fear of the unknown is the essential mystery of the story: who is Jane Doe, and why and how is she doing this? The characters don't understand until near the end of the film, and since the audience learns along with them, not understanding why or how Jane Doe is doing what she's doing is part of the fear. The fear of the unpredictable is what Jane Doe is actually doing. The characters don't know the extent of her powers, the extent of her wrath, or what she's going to do to them next. The fear of the distorted human body is, obviously, the reanimated corpses from the morgue cooler. The anticipation of already knowing some of the corpses adds to this fear: when you see the woman whose mouth is sewn shut, you almost expect her to open her mouth, and when she does, it's horrific. (The graphic effects of the film are also very well-done -- not so realistic that they're hard to look at, but realistic enough to seem natural and thus not violate suspension of disbelief. This is what makes it scary in the moment.) When you see the man who's been shot in the face, you expect for the light to flash on and finally show you his blown-off face, and when it does, it's horrific. This is what makes it stick with you.

The music score of the movie is also very well-done, in my opinion. It's not overdone to the point of being noticeable, but it adds a very nice layer of anticipatory anxiety to the film. The "let the sun shine in" song is a good motif, not just because it's creepy, but because it ties parts of the story together. At the end when Jane Doe is in the hearse, and the song comes on the car radio, the audience knows why and what it is. The music played just before things got really bad earlier in the movie, so heaven knows what Jane Doe is about to do now. Thus, I would say the horror elements of the film are relatively effective.

Next is the entanglement of the horror elements in the narrative. The story would have been almost exactly the same without the dead bodies wandering around, but the story taking place in a morgue makes showing the bodies during the exposition a Chekov's gun. It would have been odd for there not to be any bodies in the cooler, and if there are bodies in the cooler, they have to walk around zombified later in the film. So while the horror elements aren't strictly necessary to the narrative, they are necessary to the cohesiveness and believability of the film as a whole.

How enjoyable the movie is to watch is of course an entirely subjective and personal matter, but in my opinion, it's very enjoyable to watch. It's a compelling mystery, it has effective horror that's not grotesque to the point of being unwatchable, and it's a fun story and a well-composed film overall. I enjoyed it. I hope you do, too.

Posted May 09, 2022