André Øvredal’s first English-language horror film, The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016), is in equal amounts creepy and scary. The entire film takes place within a morgue – yes, read that again – and beautifully sets the tone for the bloody horror, deaths, hallucinations, and discoveries along the way. The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) has to be one of the better horror movies that will spook you and leave you wanting more of it. Watch the film first, then dive into this explanation to better understand the quirky plot details. SPOILERS ALERT!
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
The film begins at a crime scene – a perfectly regular suburban house – where the police investigate multiple people’s deaths. The investigating officer is called forth to look at something unusual in the basement: the body of a naked woman half buried in the soil with no relation to any family members. Another investigating officer informs the officer-in-charge that there seems to be no sign of breaking in. Instead, it seems like everyone in the house was trying to break out before their deaths happened.
The police send the body of the unidentified corpse (a Jane Doe, in the officer-in-charge’s words) for an autopsy. This autopsy takes place in the morgue located in the house of father and son coroner duo – Tommy (played by Brian Cox) and Austin (played by Emile Hirsch). The film gives us a sneak peek into the working dynamic between the father and son as we see them performing an autopsy on a corpse and filming it on video.
Timmy is clearly efficient and more experienced at deducing the cause of death, while Austin seems to be playing an apprentice to him. The latter tells Timmy that he and his girlfriend, Ophelia (played by Emma Roberts), maybe going out for a movie later that night. While Austin stitches up the body and stores it on one of the shelves, Timmy heads out for a smoke break.
Ophelia makes a surprise visit to their house, and Timmy lets her see the dead bodies they have stored in the morgue. When she inquires about the necessity of tying bells, the latter explains that coroners used a dated accessory to understand if the dead body was dead and jokes about using them in present times because he is a traditionalist. Some corpse-watching later, Austin and Ophelia leave when the sheriff arrives with Jane Doe’s body.
Austin is now thinking about leaving his dad alone to perform this autopsy. His conversation with Ophelia reveals that he plans to tell his father that he doesn’t want to continue in the same profession anymore but is struggling to come out about it to his father. He pleads for Ophelia to return in two hours, at 11 p.m., so they can watch the midnight show.
Back at the morgue, the sheriff reveals that they have not found any fingerprint or clue to determine who this young woman might be and asks Timmy to perform an autopsy on her that night because the chief investigating officer was pressing to learn more about the corpse by the morning. Father and son are at it again.
As they slowly proceed through each stage of the autopsy, from preliminary investigation to a thorough look into her body and organs, more confusing signs appear. For example, her eyeballs are cloudy, suggesting that she has been dead for a long time, but there is no sign of rigor mortis, and she has an unusually small waist that is not proportional to her body frame.
Suddenly, the lights start flickering, and they hear radio static while Timmy opens the corpse up. Austin spots a leakage in the blood sample of Jane Doe and sets about cleaning it up. The former is starting to get more and more confused as he proceeds through the autopsy, and the father and son seem to talk about how cruelly the person may have been tortured before their death.
Hearing some noise outside, Austin goes into the corridor but spots no one. He also thinks he saw someone in the mirror but can find no one. Austin chases a ghostly sound, tips, and falls down, and Timmy comes to the scene. Together, they find their injured cat – Stanley – stuck in the vent, and Timmy wrings its neck to put an end to its mortal suffering and later incinerates it.
Back at the morgue again, the autopsy restarts. The radio forecasts a raging storm coming the town’s way. Sensing something ominous, Austin proposes to finish the autopsy in the morning, but Timmy tells the former off since they are nowhere near the finishing line. Austin tries to tell Timmy to get out of the morgue. However, the latter pays no attention to him. Suddenly, the lights in the morgue explode and plunge the whole place into darkness.
The two of them try to get out, but they are clearly stuck inside because the emergency phone calls they try don’t work, and there is a storm raging outside. Suddenly, they sense the presence of an entity outside their office door. Subsequently, Timmy is hurled inside the washroom with a magnetic force, injuring him.
Both of them try to rationalize the situation, but they quickly conclude that the body – Jane Doe – is the cause of all things supernatural happening to them. They try to light a fire to the body, setting the whole lab on fire in the process. The latter is burned, but the body remains intact. As they both struggle to escape the loud banging noises at their door, they try to board the elevator.
Before boarding it, Austin swiftly uses his emergency axe on a dark presence, only to realize that he has murdered his girlfriend, Ophelia, in the process. Stuck in the elevator now, Timmy and Austin head out to the morgue one last time to figure out the cause of death of their subject and try and stop the evil force, recognizing that their lives are in danger anyway.
What is the film about?
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2012) is a supernatural horror film that centers on the corpse of an unknown woman sent for autopsy at a morgue run by a father and son coroner duo. When examining the body, strange things occur around them, including the spontaneous change in radio stations, the disappearance of bodies in the morgue, etc. Ultimately, we realize that the body belongs to a woman who turned into a witch due to the tortures she underwent during one of the Salem Witch Trials of 1963. She plans to resurrect to punish humanity for its crimes.
What is the morgue analysis of Jane Doe’s corpse?
As Tommy and Austin begin performing an examination on Jane Doe’s corpse, they realize that the body has no external wounds. The cloudiness of its eyes suggests that the woman has been dead for days, but the body shows no signs of rigor mortis and bleeds fresh blood. They also think that Jane Doe appears to be in her mid-twenties. The ankles and wrists are broken from the inside but show no outward signs, same as her burnt lungs. The latter signals that the body should have suffered from third-degree burns.
They confirm there was peat under her nails and hair, suggesting the body may not have been killed in the locality. The corpse also has its tongue crudely chopped and a lower molar tooth missing, which they then find inside her stomach. They also find Jimson weed in her system, suggesting that Jane Doe may have been paralyzed. The inside of the body is also etched with ritualistic markings. All these suggest that Jane Doe’s body has undergone severe torture before dying.
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) Ending Explained:
Who is Jane Doe?
Deeply disturbed, Tommy and Austin are convinced by now that the supernatural incidents taking place in their house result from Jane Doe’s corpse in their autopsy room. They return to it for further examination and find out that the brain cells of the corpse are still active, signifying that though the body may be dead, some miraculous energy simultaneously keeps it biologically alive as well. The cloth shows some markings from Leviticus 20:27 and the year 1693 – the year of the Salem Witch Trials – and that is when it strikes them that Jane Doe’s body doesn’t belong to the present time.
Instead, they come to believe that she inhabits the body of a witch from the 17th century. We are forced to look back upon the Salem Witch Trials in the 17th century and how innocent young women and girls were burnt at the stake due to superstitious religious beliefs. Although Tommy believes that the idea of witches may be grounded in mass hysteria, Jane Doe, they believe, was tortured to the extreme.
Her tongue was severed, a tooth broken, and she was forced to swallow it. Ankles and wrists are broken, etchings of markings on her skin, burning of her lungs, and laceration of her insides. Tommy’s theory posits that the very act of attempting to kill a witch inadvertently birthed a witch in Jane Doe’s case. So, Jane was an ordinary girl, and the ritualistic torture seemingly transformed her into a witch, who is immortal now and continues to feel the pain of that torture through the centuries even though her mortal body is dead.
They further conjure that they are merely in her path of revenge against humanity and end up as victims. In the process, Jane Doe gets to resurrect her body little by little. It is hinted that if this process continues, Jane Doe will return to life and wreck hell upon humanity.
Tommy decides to offer himself up to Jane Doe – the witch and supernatural force – so that his son is spared. He says he won’t fight her but wants to help her instead. Immediately afterward, the lights start to dim, and we see Tommy being supernaturally inflicted by the same kinds of wounds as on the corpse. Simultaneously, the corpse is miraculously seen to recover. As Tommy lies dying, the corpse of Jane Doe almost returns to life, denoted by the diminishing fogginess in the corpse’s eyes.
In one final attempt, Tommy tries to reach for a knife to slice off his tongue as part of his final sacrifice, but Austin stabs his father with it instead, bringing an end to his mortal pains. As Austin sits beside his father’s corpse, grieving, the radio starts playing again, and he hallucinates that the police have arrived for help. He tries to open the door leading to the outside but to no avail. Finally, he is scared by the vision of his own freshly dead father and slips from a height, tripping over the railings, to his death.
The following day, when the police arrive at the scene, they find the three dead bodies and nothing supernatural about the corpse. They are now sending the corpse of Jane Doe to Virginia Commonwealth University for a fresh re-examination. Before the film ends, we see its big toe twitching as the radio comes on in the ambulance, signaling perhaps that the people in the ambulance will meet the same fate as Tommy, Austin, and Ophelia.
Read More: The 10 Best Horror Movies of 2022
Trailer:
The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Wikipedia, Letterboxd
Cast: Emile Hirsch, Brian Cox, Olwen Catherine Kelly
Genre: Horror/Mystery & thriller, Runtime: 1h 26m
