All this would be excusable if the Hollywood-tooled version of the story were, in fact, gripping on its own, stripped-down terms. Unfortunately, the Hughes Brothers’ From Hell is a real slog. Trying to keep the audience in doubt as to the identity of a killer is a fool’s game when it’s telegraphed as obviously as it is here; regardless, turning the story into a "mystery" removes most of the intrigue present in the source material. Instead, the film is torn between the squalid stories of a handful of prostitutes who have become targets of a killer and a half-hearted police procedural involving Abberline, an inspector with an opium habit and a clairvoyant streak. This addiction, which was fabricated for the film, is apparently key to the film's roiling aesthetic, which sets huge dark clouds in motion over London. In fact, the first thing we see on-screen are close-ups of Depp puffing on an opium pipe, which appears as a gigantic fetish object. Sleepiness ensues.

I guess that’s supposed to be a marketing hook for the picture—Depp plays drug-addicted psychic cop!—but, if anything, From Hell seems overly concerned with spinning itself for a mass audience whose favor it’s unlikely to curry. Several poor decisions seem to have been made as a result of this miscalculation, chief among them the casting of statuesque blonde Heather Graham as prostitute Mary Kelly. Depp’s otherworldly cool helps him negotiate whatever he’s cast in, but Graham’s fresh girl-next-door good looks do the film’s allegedly grungy milieu no favors. In supporting roles, Katrin Cartlidge distinguishes herself by actually resembling a feisty hooker, and Ian Holm almost, but not quite, avoids embarrassing himself as a surgeon whom Abberline consults on the killer’s methods.

The artful cinematography by David Lynch collaborator Peter Deming does produce some imagery of near-hallucinatory intensity, and I suppose it might be both easy and pleasurable to slip into the film's deep colorings and dark shadows, its gothic design and the plastic beauty of its special effects. Yet there's an stylistic arbitrariness and inevitability to the production that I found off-putting, especially in the self-consciously grisly depictions of Jack going about his dirty business. Events here are so abstracted and, yes, prettified that it's hard to believe in their authenticity, a problem that the source material most absolutely did not suffer from. Despite a few attempts to highlight the class divisions of Victorian (and, by extension, contemporary) society, as well as the tendency of authority to blame identifiable minorities for criminal acts, the film lacks authority and conviction. Surprisingly, for all its inherent morbidity, From Hell mostly resists the gross-out, relegating most of its actual violence to depicting the aftermath of what happens in the shadows off-screen—though the two Hugheses apparently couldn’t resist the lure of a throat-slashing realized through the miracle of CGI. So From Hell is mostly tasteful, well-assembled, lushly designed and reasonably well-performed. What’s missing is its reason for being.