“The autopsy of Jane Doe” is decent rationalist horror. It is worth watching without spoilers, but, here is my review of it anyway.
(A reason I am so hardcore about spoilers is that I find little subtle delight in things like “figure out what kind of movie this even is.” The opening scenes do a good job of mood setting and giving you a slow drip of bits of what-kind-of-horror-movie this is. Here is your last saving throw for maybe watching the movie)
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In some sense it’s kinda like a “horror Doctor House episode”.
The core thread (really the only thread) is about an old coroner and his son who is also a corner in the old-family-coroner-business.
The police deliver a mysterious corpse of a woman who has no external skin damage and confusing combinations of “symptoms” (I’m not sure what you call it when they’re already dead).
Early on, the son is jumping to conclusions, and the dad is like “boy, we have not even finished looking at the *external* evidence let alone opened her up, chill out on the conclusions until we have all the evidence.”
They start their investigation. It gets weirder.
Horror-y stuff eventually starts happening, and I think they do a decent job of having the characters update towards “something really fucking weird is happening” at a reasonable pace, given reasonable reasoning and priors.
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Here is your second saving throw for watching the rest of the movie. *another* reason I like this movie unspoiled is that, it it’s own fucked up way, it’s doing at least a decent job of cleaving to Dr. House Mystery Format where evidence is coming in, and even as a genre-savvy viewer there are degrees of freedom of what sort of thing is going on and I found it fun to try to figure it out.
(I’m mostly not going to spoil that here because it’s not a very important part of the movie review, in some sense, but, will get into some final details)
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Eventually Horror Shit starts to go down, and the characters are freaking out dealing with a bunch of horror stuff.
But, my favorite part of the movie is when it commits to the bit, where the the characters say “okay, we still haven’t even finished the autopsy. We still don’t know what’s going on. We autopsied our way into this situation and by damn we are going to autopsy our way out of it.”
It was a nice commitment to both the specific “this is an autopsy horror drama” and the somewhat more general “this is rationalist horror, where figuring out what’s going on, and figuring out how to deal with the fact that what’s going on is *confusing* and doesn’t fit any of your original frames.
Also, when they started piecing the final bits together, there was an obvious conclusion to reach that I felt annoyed by because it was wrong (based on real world knowledge), and then characters were like “no, that conclusion is wrong based on our real world knowledge, a _different_ thing must be going on instead.”
My main complaint is that, after all his cautioning the son about jumping to conclusions, the dad… does immediately fixate on the first hypothesis that seems to fit the data at all, and double down on it… but, okay, I will cop to that being a fair take on rationalist horror too. :/
“The autopsy of Jane Doe” is decent rationalist horror. It is worth watching without spoilers, but, here is my review of it anyway.
(A reason I am so hardcore about spoilers is that I find little subtle delight in things like “figure out what kind of movie this even is.” The opening scenes do a good job of mood setting and giving you a slow drip of bits of what-kind-of-horror-movie this is. Here is your last saving throw for maybe watching the movie)
...
...
In some sense it’s kinda like a “horror Doctor House episode”.
The core thread (really the only thread) is about an old coroner and his son who is also a corner in the old-family-coroner-business.
The police deliver a mysterious corpse of a woman who has no external skin damage and confusing combinations of “symptoms” (I’m not sure what you call it when they’re already dead).
Early on, the son is jumping to conclusions, and the dad is like “boy, we have not even finished looking at the *external* evidence let alone opened her up, chill out on the conclusions until we have all the evidence.”
They start their investigation. It gets weirder.
Horror-y stuff eventually starts happening, and I think they do a decent job of having the characters update towards “something really fucking weird is happening” at a reasonable pace, given reasonable reasoning and priors.
...
Here is your second saving throw for watching the rest of the movie. *another* reason I like this movie unspoiled is that, it it’s own fucked up way, it’s doing at least a decent job of cleaving to Dr. House Mystery Format where evidence is coming in, and even as a genre-savvy viewer there are degrees of freedom of what sort of thing is going on and I found it fun to try to figure it out.
(I’m mostly not going to spoil that here because it’s not a very important part of the movie review, in some sense, but, will get into some final details)
...
...
...
Eventually Horror Shit starts to go down, and the characters are freaking out dealing with a bunch of horror stuff.
But, my favorite part of the movie is when it commits to the bit, where the the characters say “okay, we still haven’t even finished the autopsy. We still don’t know what’s going on. We autopsied our way into this situation and by damn we are going to autopsy our way out of it.”
It was a nice commitment to both the specific “this is an autopsy horror drama” and the somewhat more general “this is rationalist horror, where figuring out what’s going on, and figuring out how to deal with the fact that what’s going on is *confusing* and doesn’t fit any of your original frames.
Also, when they started piecing the final bits together, there was an obvious conclusion to reach that I felt annoyed by because it was wrong (based on real world knowledge), and then characters were like “no, that conclusion is wrong based on our real world knowledge, a _different_ thing must be going on instead.”
My main complaint is that, after all his cautioning the son about jumping to conclusions, the dad… does immediately fixate on the first hypothesis that seems to fit the data at all, and double down on it… but, okay, I will cop to that being a fair take on rationalist horror too. :/