Wed, 13 May 2020 07:28:12 GMT

From Hell, the sensational and accomplished Jack the Ripper thriller directed by Allen and Albert Hughes, takes full, violent advantage of the license opened up by several decades of extravagantly bloody popcorn horror films. In recent years, the horror genre, driven by hell-raiser special effects and the popularity of all those jokey mascot stalkers (Jason, Freddy, Pinhead), has been reduced to a carnival of jolts designed for the back shelves of video stores. ''From Hell,'' an entrancingly literate and old-fashioned mystery with a shivery note of dread at its center, is that rare thing, a horror film of genuine artistry and excitement. The Hughes brothers work with commanding restraint -- they're more interested in disturbing you than in getting you to leap under your seat in fright -- yet they are hardly ones to step back from operatic mayhem. As filmmakers, they have specialized in scalding portraits of the American inner city, and they now reveal an imagination that slashes its way across eras.

Working from a finely carpentered script by Terry Hayes and Rafael Yglesias (it was adapted from Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's even more densely textured graphic novel), the Hughes brothers take us deep inside the gaslight-and-cobblestones world of London in 1888, a murky Victorian maze in which the forces of squalor and civility remain at once separate and secretly conjoined. In the Whitechapel district, a teeming red-light ghetto where cockney ladies of the night rub up against beefy boozers in alleyways, an anonymous madman in white gloves and a top hat is on the loose, luring his victims with grapes, the ominous crack of his unfolding coach steps a hidden invitation to murder.

Mary Kelly (Heather Graham), a peach-skinned prostitute, and her circle of working-girl friends are bawdy, impoverished, and touchingly dependent, and it is hardly a coincidence that the killer is targeting them. He commits his deeds, however, in ways grisly enough to defy the wildest rationalization. Employing a velvet-lined surgeon's box of gleaming saws and knives, he removes the most intimate of body parts, inventing a slaughter as ritualistic as it is maniacal. This isn't merely a novel form of murder. It's a new way of thinking, a sadism so pitiless and refined it suggests a world in which death, let alone life, no longer enjoys the protection of God.