From Hell (2001)

From Hell arrives in 1888 Whitechapel with a great deal of fog and a modest amount of interest in the murders themselves. The Hughes Brothers build their London on a Prague backlot, all wet cobblestones and gaslight, and populate it with prostitutes who exist chiefly to be carved up by a killer with surgical pretensions. Johnny Depp plays Inspector Frederick Abberline as an absinthe-swilling dandy who solves crimes through opium visions, a choice that caused Alan Moore no small distress. The central conspiracy, involving Freemasons, the royal family, and a lobotomized witness, is entertainingly absurd. It is also entirely a product of 2001, a period piece with no designs on the present.

The cast is uniformly white, which is what a film set in Victorian London tends to produce. Women are victims, and one of them is a love interest, which the screenplay treats as tragedy rather than argument. There is no sermonizing here, no lecture smuggled into the third act, no attempt to correct the historical record in the direction of contemporary comfort. The villains are aristocrats and Masons, and the film's objection to them is that they murder people, not that they hold capital.

We are left with a handsome, grim, faintly tedious thriller that ends with Depp dead of an overdose and Heather Graham alive on an Irish cliff, having adopted the child who should have been heir to the throne. The movie asks nothing of us beyond a tolerance for viscera and a willingness to accept that history is a conspiracy conducted by men in good coats. It is a Ripper film. It knows what it is. It does not presume to improve us.