In this age of frustrating spoilers scuppering any possibility of being surprised by great storytelling, it's brilliant to find a mystery movie that I can go into knowing almost nothing about what I'm about to see.
The Autopsy Of Jane Doe is a magnificent film to experience with as little advanced knowledge as possible.
So, I shall try and be as vague as I can in this short review.
Late one night a father and son team of coroners - Tommy (Brian Cox) and Austin (Emile Hirsch) - are brought the corpse of a young woman (played by Olwen Kelly), found half-buried in the basement of a house where the two residents had seemingly been murdered in a possible home invasion.
Sheriff Burke (Michael McElhatton) wants some answers by the next morning, so the coroners are going to have to work through the night.
The investigators soon discover that although externally "Jane Doe" appears quite unblemished, internally she's a mess of strange, violent, injuries.
And from there their analysis gets even weirder.
Like a bottle episode of a TV show, The Autopsy Of Jane Doe largely takes place within a single, very claustrophobic, locale: a subterranean morgue.
And director André Øvredal, of Troll Hunter fame, makes clever use of this and his limited cast, which includes an all-too-brief appearance by the lovely Ophelia Lovibond as Austin's girlfriend, Emma.
It's a clever, Sherlockian mystery, where the clues are methodically uncovered, and the two main protagonists behave as close to "real people" - rather than characters in a horror flick - as I have seen in this genre for a long while.
The Autopsy Of Jane Doe is a classy horror film, geared more towards unnerving its audience than shocking them with stupid jump scares.
Honestly, I can't say anything more for fear of spoiling the twists and turns.
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