The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

Tommy Tilden (Brian Cox) owns a morgue in some small county in the USA. He’s also the local coroner, clearly a diligent and experienced one, working together with his son Austin (Emile Hirsch), who is staying on as his dad’s assistant more because he can’t bring himself to leave his old man, who is still not really coping with the death of his wife two years ago, than because he loves the work.

This night, the local sheriff (Michael McElhatton) brings trouble to their door in form of a female unidentified corpse (Olwen Kelly). The titular Jane Doe was found half buried in the cellar of a family home whose other inhabitants have died under mysterious circumstances. How the young woman came to be there nobody knows, nor is the cause of her death at all apparent – she looks as well-preserved as any corpse you’ll encounter (he said, expertly).

On the outside she does at least. As the Tildens will discover during the autopsy, on the inside, Jane Doe is suffering from all manner of horrible injuries. Impossible injuries for that matter, for there’s no way her inside could look like it does and her outside not showing any of it. While the coroner duo puzzle over the corpse and what they find in it, strange and increasingly threatening things start happening around them. It’s as if their Jane Doe is much more then just a creepy corpse.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe is not exactly the film you’d expect André Øvredal to direct after the brilliant POV horror/fantasy comedy Troll Hunters. It is a very different film both tonally and formally, yet it shares with the previous one its director’s calm control over his material and a precise focus on what’s important for the film at hand.

Formally, The Autopsy is nearly classicist horror, taking the autopsy gone wrong scenes we know as set pieces from quite a few other films and turning them into a full movie that decides not to follow a lot of horror rules established in the 80s. So there’s barely a body count – making the deaths that do happen all the more emotionally important – and while this isn’t a film that’s showing nothing of its supernatural threat (there’s a bit of the red stuff for sure, some might argue even a bit too much in the finale scenes), Øvredal prefers to use things that are heard but not seen, shadows in the corner, and the audience’s minds.

He’s rather brilliant at this, too, using the small cast and the few rooms the film takes place in to create a palpable affair of dread, isolating his characters and turning their normal surroundings into a place of horror for them (while still keeping the irony in mind that the characters’ normal surroundings would certainly strike parts of the audience as anything but). The escalation of the situation is nearly perfectly timed as well, developing slowly but not so slowly anyone should get impatient.

One of the film’s greatest strengths is how cleverly it uses Tommy’s and Austin’s relationship and their character background not only to make them relatable to an audience (which is always well-meant but a very basic thing to do) but really makes what makes them tick important to the way they relate to the supernatural goings-on. Even though there’s a thematic and metaphorical relation between Jane Doe and the Tildens, and more importantly to the way they react to her, The Autopsy never falls into the habit of only seeing its supernatural threat as the metaphor. So this is very much a film about pain, what it does to people for worse yet also for better, and how we attempt to take on other peoples’ pain, but it is also a film about two guys fighting a supernatural threat that deserves quite a bit of compassion. Which is just the way I like a horror film to handle this sort of thing.

I’m not terribly fond of the film’s final act, though, for in the last few minutes, the plot stumbles into a needless array of horror film conventions that doesn’t really feel of a piece with what came before. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if that most terrible of monsters, the focus group, had struck there again.

Still, a bad minute or fifteen are by far not enough to drag down a film this accomplished and clever, so The Autopsy of Jane Doe is still one of the best horror films I’ve seen last year (and 2016 had quite a few good to brilliant ones).

The Troll Hunter (2010)

Original title: Trolljegeren

As has happened a few dozen times before, the footage Troll Hunter consists of are the last traces of a plucky trio of film students (Tomas Alf Larsen, Johanna Morck, Glenn Erland Tosterud) that some mysterious anonymous has brought into the hands of the film's producers.

The footage shows the students attempting to solve the secret of a mysterious hunter (Otto Jespersen) who seems to follow the officially sanctioned hunters stalking the perpetrator of a series of bear attacks around. Though the hunter, going by the name of Hans, really doesn't want to have anything to do with our heroes, they begin to follow him secretly around Norway. One night, in a mightily impressive forest, they are attacked by something Hans, in a moment of overexcitement, identifies as a troll to them. Not surprisingly, the students are a bit sceptical about the existence of these particular creatures of myth, but when the gnarly, mono-syllabic Hans permits them to observe his work and interview him, they're soon quite convinced by what their own eyes show them.

Hans, you see, is the secret troll hunter of an arm of the Norwegian government desperately trying to keep trolls a secret and away from humans; it's Hans's job to kill those trolls roaming around outside their reservation. The hunter wouldn't usually talk about his work, but he has become somewhat disgruntled by the way his bureaucratic bosses are treating him.

Right now, it's a difficult time for him anyhow - for some reason, a whole lot of trolls has left their usual territories and is roaming around free, munching on stones, cows and civilians alike. Not surprisingly, running around with a film team isn't going to make the hunter's life any easier.

Just when I thought the POV/found footage style of filmmaking had found its all-time low with films like the two Paranormal Activitys and The Last Exorcism, there suddenly comes Norwegian director Andre Øvredal's Troll Hunter around to show me that there's still life in the old lady.

Troll Hunter also teaches us that you can make a comedy inside the POV sub-genre without making it a comedy about the POV sub-genre. A parody of the form would be the most obvious yet also the least interesting way to go about it. Instead, Øvredal goes into the more difficult, but also much more satisfying, direction of a bone-dry humour that's based on thinking the absurd premise of a government troll hunter through, while having a lot of fun with the details of his own worldbuilding. So obviously - and really, if you're living in Central or Northern Europe, it is so obvious that it's funny - Hans needs to fill out a form for every troll he kills, explaining if it exploded or turned to stone and probably also what direction the wind blew from. Details like this are presented with the straightest face imaginable, a tone that is responsible for a lot of Troll Hunter's effectiveness as a comedy; the absurd being something that is funniest when presented in as earnest a tone as possible.

The film has a lot of fun with applying elements of the troll belief from myth and children's books to its giant monsters. Did you know these creatures are really into the blood of Christians? And that certain modern Christian students wouldn't admit to being religious in front of their peers? Hilarity (and just possibly a dead Christian) ensues.

The Troll Hunter being a comedy doesn't mean it eschews the necessary (and beloved) elements of the giant monster movies I suspect its director and writer loves as much as I do, so there is as much of the mandatory gasping at big things stomping around as the budget allows. The trolls are in fact pretty fantastic looking CGI work that finds the sweet spot between the silly - they are based on the long-nosed children's book idea of trolls, after all - and the pretty darn impressive, without ever falling into the trap of avoiding to make the trolls menacing because they are absurd parts of a comedy a worse film would have stepped right into.

Further bonus points go to Øvredal's careful, nausea-avoiding use of shaky cam. Øvredal never overuses that most unloved part of the POV horror style, giving using shots stable enough to let one believe the student filmmakers here were actually competent. The director even shows us a lot of the trolls quite clearly, giving the whole affair a feeling of veracity an overuse of shaking and wobbling could easily have destroyed instead of increased. And, you know, Norway's landscape is just too impressive not to show it clearly.

But what really set a wide grin onto my face for most of Troll Hunter's running time is the feeling of fun that pervades it from minute one, a sense of wonder and joy at telling an especially contrived tall tale to a receptive audience that knows you're putting one on it, and still loves every second of it.

 

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