"Every body has a secret," the tagline reads. That seems to be the mantra for the main characters of this film, a father-and-son pair of coroners. Working diligently and in perfect tandem, they deliver results with speed and care. One night a mysterious woman is wheeled in, the only unidentified corpse in a particularly violent murder scene, and the sheriff requests her cause of death to be high priority. Foregoing his date night, Austin stays with his father Tommy to open up the corpse.
Each new piece of evidence, however, leads them to different and conflicting conclusions. How can her skin be pristine when the organs beneath display stab wounds? How is fresh blood seeping from her nose and incisions when her cloudy eyes suggest she has been dead for days? Why are the bones in her wrists and ankles broken, and why has her tongue been cut out, and why are her lungs blackened from severe burns? Then there's the things they find inside her stomach. As if their night couldn't get any weirder or worse, strange things begin to happen around them. A storm arises, and something blocks the exit. Strange noises are coming from the vent, and the phone line isn't working. Light bulbs explode, doors open and close, and the other bodies in the morgue disappear.
The film is largely a love letter to the genre. It sews various motifs together until the movie itself becomes a Frankenstein's monster of references and likenesses. Besides sundry movies and shows, however, it also reminded me of a Stephen King short story. It starts with a mysterious scene of death, moves into a homely little location with two hard workers in a secluded environment, builds in tension and horror, reveals an explosive secret that hinges on our understanding of history, climaxes with an emotional sacrifice, and ends with the knowledge that the evil is not vanquished. In many ways, the film reminded me of Oculus, a similarly family-centered horror film that relishes in perceptions and misperceptions of reality; it's that quintessential meta-horror where what we see is not always what we get, horrifying for us the audience because we only see what the movie wants us to see. When the characters hallucinate, so do we, and we cannot trust our primary sensory access to the film.
I don't want to spoil the fun, so I'll leave it there. It's a 90-minute blast of pure horror. Artsy and stylish, the film takes immense pleasure in eking out the frisson we feel around dead bodies. The morgue's atmosphere is fabulously precise, and Brian Cox as the coroner/father is pitch-perfect casting. It's one of the scariest movies I've seen in some time, and I made the mistake of watching it alone in the dark. Sure, the climax is overwritten and tries too hard to Affect you. But if that's the only sin, we can forgive it. Even if Jane Doe can't.
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