A father and son mortician team find more than they bargained for when the body of an unidentified woman shows up in their morgue. The more they try to unravel her mysteries the more danger they find themselves in.

The film stars Brian Cox and Emile Hirsch as the father son duo who are challenged by the local police to figure out what this girl before dawn. There’s some tension between them as Hirsch wants to break away from the family business and run away with his girlfriend. Cox brings his gravitas and usual gruffness to the role, and it’s always a pleasure to see him. Hirsch is fine.

They conduct the examination in three stages an initial observation stage, an internal examination, and then a full examination of the organs. It’a a simple thing to break down the action in sections like this, but it goes a long way in helping the audience follow along. It also creates a lot of tension as bad things happen, we know it’s only going to get worse as each stage goes along.

From the jump there are things wrong with this corpse. No external signs of trauma. No bruises or cuts, but her wrists are shattered. Her tongue has been removed. They can’t determine when she died. There’s still blood in her vein which would indicate recent death but other factors indicate she died several days ago. The more they discover, the more spooky things start to happen around them.

What I like about the movie is the strong hand behind the camera. It is a slow creeping dread that is built up through strong camerawork and intelligent pacing. The director is André Øvredal a Norwegian filmmaker who brings some Nordic flavor to the proceedings.

The mystery itself is super intriguing and really fun to uncover all the horrific ways in which this body simply doesn’t make sense. These horrific discoveries combined with the external spooky happenings create a delicious dread.

What I didn’t like is the explanation. I think the movie falls apart in its second half as we start to get some ideas about who and what the body is. It also becomes way more predictable and obvious to me where the movie is going.

Spoilers. They find many clues inside the body, a piece of parchment with Bible verses written on it inside her throat. Her lungs are scorched as if burned. Her body has been through traumas indicating torture. The morticians theorize that she is one of the Salem witches who endured such trauma that her body is now cursed. It appears flawless but carries all the evil that was done to it. Anyone who harms or further hurts the body is visited by evil spirits who will inflict that pain on those around her. The morticians are pursued by evil spirits throughout their mortuary. It felt more generic and standard once the ghouls showed up. The explanation didn’t work for me. It just crumbled for me.

Now I know that no explanation will ever be as intriguing as the mystery itself. But if you have to come up with an explanation I just that it be interesting and plausible within the world of the film. The explanation here doesn’t interest me, and it doesn’t feel plausible within the world the movie creates. It doesn’t make sense to me that this body would be drifting between different morticians for a couple hundred years. I don’t buy it. It pulled me out of the movie. Maybe I’m just tired of people using the Salem Witch trials as a crutch in horror movies.

Anyway, the film is strong for two thirds of its runtime. Just because it falls apart for me doesn’t mean it will fall apart for you. This one has been strongly recommended to me for years, and I’m glad I finally watched it even if it wasn’t entirely successful for me.

It’s half a cup of tea for me. It’s a solid B.