In short: The Price We Pay (2022)

A trio of criminals – Stephen Dorff as the sensible one, Emile Hirsch in a risible performance as the kill-hungry psycho and some guy whose name I’m too lazy to look up as the soon to be dead one – and a hostage (Gigi Zumbado), fleeing the results of their bloody assault on a mafia-run pawnshop, end up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. Sensible One and Psycho would be bound to murder one another sooner or later, but the dark and unintentionally funny secret below the farm is going to make that rather unnecessary.

Even working with little money, Ryuhei Kitamura only seldom can resist being a show-off, still loving tacky editing tricks and crap practical effects to bits. I would like him, and probably more of his movies, for this, but most of them end up lacking the sort of charm or aesthetic individuality that would make them work for me as the kind of cool exploitation fare they are so clearly supposed to be. To my eyes, most of his films are nearly totally lacking in this regard, as well as in decent scripts, with a couple of exceptions where I always assume somebody behind the scenes managed to channel Kitamura’s bad taste in the right directions to present his actual talents as a filmmaker.

This is not one of those movies, but rather an increasingly stupid mix of would-be post-Tarantino crime movie, torture porn, and a lot of annoyingly edited gore, mostly taking place in ugly, fake looking sets and of course a patch of desert. Dorff and Zumbado do their best with what they are given, but since the script by Kitamura and Christopher Jolley shows little idea of how to work clichés productively, and Hirsch is actively working against them, they are pretty much left alone.

Which leaves a couple of decent gore gags I’d probably have more patience for in a film made by someone working out of their family garage. So, hardly a movie at all.

Three Films Make A Post: Everyone gets old. Not everyone grows up.

Young Adult (2011): On one hand, I have complete respect for Jason Reitman’s willingness to make a film about a woman hitting a tough spot and returning to her small town home that doesn’t espouse small town virtues as the be all and end all of “true” life and adulthood. On the other hand, the resulting film is then - quite consequently – about a character who experiences things but never learns anything from them, who doesn’t change for better or for worse, the only point seeming that some people can’t change, even if they are shitty and broken enough to need it, which is neither news nor particularly interesting to me. Sure, there is a lot to be said against all those movies about the cleansing power of returning home, but replacing hope with nothing isn’t a terrible convincing proposition either, however well Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt are selling this (Patrick Wilson is his usual nonentity, which might be a purposeful casting decision here).

Prince Avalanche (2013): Also not exactly to my tastes is this one, directed by David Gordon Green, in which Paul Rudd and Emile Hirsch at least do make something out of their experience of doing – sometimes – road work on a godforsaken road. I’m not terribly convinced by the tone of the affair, though, Green desperately trying to elevate the pretty bare script into something universal but never quite succeeding for me. But then, I usually have the problem with Green’s more serious-minded films of not seeing that he’s actually saying those as much about life, love and the rest he seems to think his films do. That might just be me, though.


Freaks (2018): Let’s finish on this film by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (of Leprechaun: Origins “fame”) which first casts what turns out to be a really bad X-Men movie as an intriguing and atmospheric mystery about a little girl (Lexy Kolker) building the wrong picture of a complicated world her father (hey, it’s Emile Hirsch again) doesn’t bother even attempting to explain to her. The more the film explains about what is actually going on with and in the world here, the more stupid it gets, though, reaching a sort of apex of awkward dialogue, bizarre writing choices and characters who will do any damn shit because it is in the script in a climax that has to be seen to be believed. And to think that much of what’s happened could have been avoided if any of the grown-ups here had at least attempted to explain the world to Chloe, the kid character, something like “some of us have special powers, bad people hunt those with special powers; we have special powers, therefor we must hide, yes, even from ice cream vans and the lady next door”.

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).