An inexplicable massacre in a villa and the body of a mysterious woman half-dug up. What happened and why, but above all, who is that girl? This is what Tony Tilden, an excellent Brian Cox, and his son Austin, played by the resurrected Emile Hirsch, two forensic doctors working in the family business in a small Virginia town, must find out. When the lifeless body of the young woman, renamed Jane Doe because she has no identity, arrives at the morgue, nothing is the same, and the clinical, and cynical, eye of the two scientists begins to falter in the face of the strangeness of what they have to dissect: a seemingly fresh, clean, and beautiful corpse but torn from the inside. How is this possible?
"Autopsy", with the original title "The Autopsy of Jane Doe", is the first English-language film by Norwegian director André Øvredal, presented at the last Toronto International Film Festival and in American cinemas since December 2016.
A good horror film, like few others, that manages to balance an educated splatter made of gruesome but credible details and never an end in itself, with constant and palpable tension, well distributed between the first and second parts of the film.
Few actors, a single location, an old and claustrophobic morgue terribly unsettling, with an elevator as the only way in and out, and a mystery to solve that becomes less and less clear with each clue.
"Autopsy" starts almost like a gripping thriller to then transform, little by little, into a real horror with a somewhat overused theme, which we will not reveal, but approached in a completely new way. This is the main merit of this film, along with the skill of the actors and the more than convincing construction of the characters. A father and son bound by a tragic personal history, with emotional problems they try to hide by working together, diametrically opposed in facing this singular autopsy. Do not underestimate, absolutely, Olwen Kelly, the actress who portrays the mysterious Jane Doe, brilliant even in the role of the corpse.
For an eye accustomed to horror, the solution to the mystery is not so impossible to discover, but the film's intentions are different.
The director, in fact, knows how to play skillfully on the certainties of the spectator who knows that something horrible is about to happen and awaits, with anxiety, the inevitable. And even the toughest spectator will remain glued to their seat, victim of relentless tension, immersed in this spectral atmosphere of an underground morgue made of very long corridors and neon lights that will know well when to turn off.
"Autopsy" is in Italian cinemas from March 8, 2017, distributed by M2 Pictures, and we recommend you not to miss it if you are horror lovers!
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