The Autopsy of Jane Doe

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. (2017-01-15)

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. (2018-12-29)

The first "forensic" half in the style of "conversations at the autopsy table" is very fresh and exciting, the second begins to use on more familiar genre tropes and uses shabby jump scares. Exchanges of views between father and son are sometimes engulfed by rigor mortis, and the final revelation is not exactly from the "what you don't hear about every Halloween" category, but the rather skillful directing and good atmosphere push it through the kiln door with triumph. André Øvredal did not disappoint, just another crunchy story, this time sprinkled with formaldehyde and conducted in a sharp sagittal spirit. By the way, it's a movie that awakens the necrophile in someone. A little bit. (2016-12-28)

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. (2017-07-03)

I had no idea how much fun you can have watching two dissectors sinking themselves, sometimes up to their elbows, into the slippery entrails of the motionless Jane Doe. Up to a certain point in the story, the filmmakers managed to build up a very strong atmosphere full of suspense and fear of the unknown. Had they managed to keep it up until the end, it would have been a clear five stars. But despite my disappointment in the last third, I did have fun. I was thrilled, and I believe that many viewers will switch on the lights in all the rooms on their way to the toilet at night while anxiously looking over their shoulder. (2017-11-15)