From Hell: A Disturbing Horror Noir from The Hughes Brothers
The characters in From Hell live in an underworld. London. 1888. Prostitutes butchered. The murderer never officially apprehended. But what can be underrated about the term underworld is that initial implication: underneath. The characters in From Hell are underneath a power structure.
One of the more striking shots early in the film is a sinister framing of Cleopatra’s Needle through the eyes of an about-to-be-murdered prostitute. Cleopatra’s Needle may as well be splashed with a couple coats of blood. This is a London of red skies and sad sex alleyways, a place where scapegoating minorities for crimes is as a reflexive as the insatiable attributes forced upon them by their oppressors. A world we do not know, yet we also know perfectly well. The approaching dawn of a new century, punctuated by state sanctioned ritualistic murder, shadow police forces, lobotomy and insanity, does not seem like much of an occasion for champagne.
This is certainly not one for any time-traveller tourism ads. When a brigand outside a barroom grabs Heather Graham’s Mary Kelly and slurs, “penny for a suck,” one certainly understands what she does for a living. These are not characters alienated from their setting. Rather they are entwined with the city. So the film’s sense of place is personal. The Hughes Brothers’ creative scene transitions, whether emerging from the horn of a phonograph or a frame of a facial close-up, contribute to a sense of immersion. The tendency is pushed further through the characters’ interiority. The Hughes Brothers simply gofor these moments: employing jump cutting, hallucinogenic color tinting, and discomforting montage among other jarring techniques.
Johnny Depp’s Frederick Abberline, an opium addicted absinthe swill haunted by the death of his wife as a result of a miscarriage and prone to barbiturate powered visions of criminality, often seems unconvinced about still being alive himself. It’s a performance that becomes more impressive in hindsight: upon contemplating the character’s eventual suicide. (confirmed by the coins in hand) Depp never plays Abberline as someone capable of feeling hope. He seems lost in a dream, only temporarily stirred by the ghost of his wife in Mary Kelly.
Graham plays Mary Kelly as tough and resourceful. But being the youngest of her prostitute friends, the brightness in her eyes is not yet simply an advertisement for customers on the corner. She’s still capable of trusting people and believing they can be good. And she remembers her home in Ireland by the sea as somewhere she can return.
Depp’s restrained performance allows the viewer to interpret his actions in a variety of ways. We never know for sure whether he truly fell for Mary, or whether the case was his paramount concern all along. In one of the film’s most effective scenes, Abberline takes Mary to an art gallery. Initially the scene plays satisfyingly obvious. The inspector walks his prostitute date up a carpeted flight of stairs to the chagrin of a rich woman passing them by. Art can bring people together who do not belong together. Like princes and prostitutes. Mary Kelly does not belong here. And Graham plays the moment well: with the excitement of an adult who had not believed there could be anymore good surprises. Then comes the inspector showing her a portrait of the prince. She did not know him to be a prince. Just a well-to-do painter her friend was slagging. And we don’t know if Abberline felt a damn about Mary being in an art gallery other than her confirming a photograph. We may want to believe differently about Abberline. We do have that option. The screenplay by Rafael Yglesias and Terry Hayes, adapted from a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, impressively balances realism and genre from a tonal standpoint. The dialogue never strikes a bum chord in terms of historical accuracy. And its useful being reminded that a work can play with genre convention without abandoning dramatic severity in an era of direly somber prestige television drama.
The pace of the film stagnates when it becomes too involved in the particular genre reflected in a certain set of scenes. When the movie becomes a detective procedural the crime scene investigations drag, despite conveying information for the purposes of plot and foreshadowing. And then there are moments late where the film feels too much like one of those late nineties, early 00s horror gore fests. We know murder is imminent. We even get a few jump scares and a half-hearted chase scene in a dark alleyway. Ironically enough this feels like slumming. These are tactics meant to engage an audience potentially losing interest. But From Hell is the type of film that’s either going to appeal to a viewer immediately or lose the viewer. A dagger being spotted in the reflection of a puddle is certainly a neat visual, but it doesn’t feel necessary in lieu of further character development, nor would it win back somebody hopelessly disgusted over an hour ago. Another weakness of the film is that Mary’s prostitute friends hardly seem disturbed enough by the butchery of their cohort. When Liz Stride’s knocking back suds instead of being on high alert for a dismembering madman, that’s especially a failure, because it reeks of the slasher conceit that victims be partly blamed for their fate. In fairness, Stride is portrayed as an alcoholic who cannot control her need to drink. And the poverty of the women is effectively put across as an impediment to rational decision-making. (making Mary Kelly’s consistent rationality quite convenient, being the star of the film and all) Though Katrin Catrlidge, Susan Lynch, Annabelle Apsion, Lesley Sharp, Samantha Spiro and Joanna Page all give an authentic energy to their women of the night, they are letdown by the conventions of plot. Because the film is a drama and information is revealed to the viewer in a deliberate manner, the victims appear foolish for not realizing that they themselves are in a movie. A more effective melding of the plot-based drama of the film and the actual reality of these victims, where they could not have possibly protected themselves given their circumstances, would have made for better storytelling.
But it is in the overall experience of From Hell, especially in the subtle commentaries on class, wealth, and power where the movie shines like a scalpel under a full moon’s pale light. When a man born with physical defects is paraded at a surgeon’s conference and told to “turn around,” by someone off-screen as if he were a model on a runway, we feel the gaze of wealth upon their definitions of abnormality and deformity. When Jack the Ripper’s final murder devolves into a demented fantasy of a lecture on human anatomy concluded with respectful applause, as the disemboweled victim lays on a cold operating table, in fact the bed she had been sleeping in, we feel the vulnerability of our own bodies in a world where class privilege fuels delusions of superiority and dehumanization. We also may understand the importance of black filmmakers commenting on white subject matter, especially subject matter most likely to be primarily white, like a film about London in 1888, and doubly so for subject matter about white male violence. Would a white filmmaker have dived as deeply into Ian Holm’s frighteningly portrayed Jack the Ripper during his gruesome climatic murder? We do not know the answer to that question. We do know that the Hughes brothers did. And they said something definitive about the violence of their Jack the Ripper: he is a systematic violence.
Even a relatively light moment (in this film) like Prince Albert being dragged from the woman who does not know him to be a prince, carried away by the royal secret police like a child with his feet off the ground, points to a particular perspective: we are being shown a man humiliated by the police. Helpless. We feel our feet off the ground too.
“Goodnight Sweet Prince,” says Robbie Coltrane’s Shakespeare quoting Sergeant Godley, the film’s closing line. As an inconvenient consequence of the underworld, there is no redemptive ascension From Hell, only Mary Kelly’s escape.
