That premise - which finds wealthy white liberals using hypnosis and brain surgery to turn black people into their slaves - skewered the notion of a post-racial America from multiple directions at once, setting aside more obvious targets to unearth some of the worst aspects of black-white tensions hiding in plain sight. One of the great American movies of the year, Jordan Peele’s directorial debut has a lot on its mind: It’s a blistering attack on latent white racism among America’s wealthy one percent, and the story merges the interracial dynamics of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” with a B-movie premise worthy of George Romero. Her frozen gaze as the coroners stand above her invites scrutiny that taps into a kind of deep-seated dread: Did she just blink? Or was that your imagination? And…did the bell tied to her toe just let out a small ding? “Jane Doe” will leave you pondering those questions in the dead of night. Ultimately, the most remarkable performance in “Jane Doe” belongs to Olwen Kelly as the motionless body getting snipped apart over the course of the movie.
And when the jump scares finally do arrive in the morbid finale, they hit hard. Communing with the spirit of “The Shining,” Ovredal spins the material into a minimalist haunted house story in which the slow approach of a dead person’s footsteps on the other side of a creaky door holds far more terrible possibilities than any given jump scare. That job turns out to be a lot more terrifying than they expected, as strange paranormal events start to encroach on the morgue, and the two men begin to suspect that the dead woman on the table has something to do with it.
Played by Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch, the characters are tasked with a late-night mystery: Figure out the cause of death by morning. Father-and-son coroners stand over a motionless corpse in Andre Ovredal’s (“Trollhunters”) first English language feature, a taut supernatural thriller that takes place almost exclusively within the confines of a morgue.
0 kommentar(er)
