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The Autopsy of Jane Doe
(2016)
After a very enticing intro, in which the ever dependable Brian Cox welcomes us to a coroner's everyday life, before a mysterious corpse lands on his table, Norwegian director André Øvredal becomes a little too hung up on replicating classic horror aesthetics and placing his film in a certain tradition instead of continuing on a more offbeat path which could have made this really interesting. This is nevertheless a film that looks marvellous and has a timelessness in its visuals. But the thematics and the logic the film creates for itself doesn't hold up; it's in conflict with the horror clichés we're being subjected to. Like so many delves into supernatural horror, The Autopsy of Jane Doe always keeps an emergency exit for itself. When the logic can always be betrayed, there's always a way out of any situation, which means that everything you watch will be of progressively less consequence the closer to the end credits you get. Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch hold the film up with their nice twosomeness. It could have been the basis for something very good. The beautiful mise-en-scene is by production designer Matthew Gant and art director Astrid Sieben.
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