From Hell

UK Release Date. 8 February 2002
Certification. 18
Running Time. 2 hours 2 mins
Director. Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes
Cast. Robbie Coltrane, Johnny Depp, Heather Graham, Ian Holm.
Rating. 59%

Review.

"One day men will look back and say that I gave birth to the twentieth century."

Jack the Ripper, one of the world’s most infamous serial killers, is a figure so steeped in myth and mystery that it’s easy to forget he was an actual person. With theories ranging from actual documented suspects (Aaron Kosminski, Walter Sickert and Francis Tumbulty) to wild, outlandish late 20th-century conspiracy theories.

In this iteration, the Hughes Brothers - who burst onto the scene in 1993, with the searingly powerful debut Menace II Society - adapt Alan Moore’s acclaimed graphic novel, From Hell. Both works take their title from the so-called ‘Lusk Letter’ - a letter purportedly sent by Jack the Ripper to George Lusk, the Chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in 1888, which featured ‘From Hell’ as the introductory heading. 

However, the film is not at all historically accurate. While many of the names are the same as real-life people, the storyline is wild, unabridged fanciful speculation. From Hell puts forward the suggestion that Jack the Ripper was involved in Free Masonry. It’s a thesis which certainly offers potential, not least, intrigue, scandal, mystery and conspiracy.

From Hell’s major redemptive point is how good it looks. Cinematographer Peter Deming, fresh from the oppressive unease he framed in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, captures 19th-century London’s squalor and beauty. His camera prowls gloomy, back alleyways like the sinister carriages menacingly loitering under blood red London skies, and the murders, themselves take place behind a vampyric cloak, before revealing the hallucinatory gruesome details.

The film opens strongly. The stunning visuals help establish an ominous atmosphere, but without a developed plot or characters, its very much a case of style without substance. The principal character, Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp) doesn’t actually do that much, and has a peculiar chemistry with Mary Kelly (Heather Graham), a prostitute who seems fated to be Jack the Ripper’s final victim. To boot, Graham’s implausibly attractive prostitute cast alongside deliberately dowdy disposable English harlets smacks of studio intervention.