The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)

What could go wrong with a movie starring a dead naked woman on a dissection table? I avoided this movie until the recent wave of horror surveys on Shudder that shout it out. High concept stories can provide one-note tension, but here the concept not only creates a compelling dilemma, but suggests profound ontological possibilities. The premise immediately cuts against the rush of the loaded situation, since the eponymous anonymous character is a recumbent question mark. Of course, her passiveness is misleading, and the stillness at the center of the film becomes a generator for amplifying effects. (This must be where Cabinet of Curiosity’s The Autopsy gets its moves, though it goes cosmic rather than witchy with its paranormal swerve.) The narrative frame might suggest that a woman at rest is vulnerable to all manner of assault, but the story cuts against that at every moment, even as the bodily violation is extreme. However, the lifeless body is neither lifeless nor merely a body, and that’s where things get interesting. The film manages to avoid the easy out of reanimation, at least for the central figure. But her agency is not so much restored as revealed. 4 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson