Works mostly on the level of an atmospheric drama. As a mystery, and as a thriller, it's not as successful.
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As John J. Puccio pointed out in his review of the DVD, this film by Albert and Allen Hughes doesn't provide the scares that you'd expect. It's largely a brooding, heavily atmospheric period piece in which the inspector who tries to track down Jack the Ripper is almost as out-of-it as the criminal.
Inspector Frederick Abberline (Johnny Depp) is prone to relax in baths with a fully-stocked bar at arm's length, or to incorporate passed-out sessions in an opium den into his research. He's a clairvoyant, you see, and the opium helps prompt the visions of the murders he's trying to solve just as much as the home cocktails he makes for himself out of Absinthe and laudanum. That twist is a stroke of genius, because Abberline's visions contribute to the atmosphere and also the blurry ambiguity of the mystery at hand.
Not much is factually known about Jack the Ripper, a serial killer who cut and removed organs from mostly prostitutes in the Whitechapel district of London in late 1888. No clear description was ever formed from testimiony by those who claim to have seen him, and he was never caught. Adding to the confusion, is that police received hundreds of letters by people claiming to be the killer--including one that was dubbed the "From Hell" letter, which was accompanied by a section of human kidney, the rest of which the writer claimed he had fried and eaten. But there was never enough evidence to point to anyone, and the case was closed, forever leaving the identity of Jack the Ripper to historians, crime novelists, and conspiracy theorists.
This script, based on a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, goes off in the direction of conspiracy, offering an interesting take on the case that involves none other than Queen Victoria herself. "From Hell" weaves three narratives together as we follow the case of the five murdered prostitutes who were confirmed victims of the serial killer, all reflecting the same modus operandi. One thread follows the prostitutes (Heather Graham, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Annabelle Apsion), who, for the purpose of this script, are all friends who have a hard time on London's mean streets. Another follows Inspector Abberline and his rotund Sgt. Peter Godley (Robbie Coltrane, a.k.a. Hagrid, who is reminiscent of John Goodman this outing) as they investigate. And a third thread follows the shadowy trail of the killer and those involved in the killer's wider circle, with as much cloak-and-dowager secrecy as required to keep readers from concluding too much too early in the film.
But, of course, we have our suspicions. Netley (Jason Flemyng), the coachman for a strange man who turns out to be the carver, is only the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of suspicious people--some of them doctors, some of them pimps, and some of them lords, including Sir William Gull (Ian Holm).
All of the performances are strong, and the backgrounds are so wonderful that you realize they're fake but appreciate them all the same. To their credit, the Hughes brothers didn't treat this like another slasher film, minimizing gore rather than wallowing in it.
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[release]22223[/release]