"The Lodger," a 1913 novel more or less about Jack the Ripper, has been made into a movie a number of times. Alfred Hitchcock's silent version was released in 1927; a sound version starring Laird Cregar, that virtuoso of interior torment, came out in 1944. Now director David Ondaatje has tried his hand at the story, and the result is ... I guess "astonishing" would have to be the word.

Ondaatje has pried this Victorian tale out of the foggy London precincts in which it's customarily been set and relocated it to modern-day Los Angeles (or perhaps an alternate-universe L.A., where it seems to rain all the time). In this iteration of the story, Hope Davis is Ellen Bunting, who's looking to rent out a guest house in back of the home she shares with her surly husband (Donal Logue). Simon Baker is the mysterious smoothy who shows up one day to rent it, informing Ellen that he's a writer and must never, ever be disturbed. When she disturbs him anyway, she finds him removing decorative prints from the walls. "They're all staring at me," he says. Although a series of gory prostitute murders has been taking place -- right on the deserted sidewalks of the strangely car-free Sunset Boulevard -- Ellen doesn't appear to find her new lodger to be anything other than kinda cute. Later she discovers him burning a pair of pants in the backyard barbecue grill, but again, whatever.

Meanwhile, a police detective named Manning (Alfred Molina) is becoming obsessed with whoever is ripping up the hookers of West Hollywood. "I want to see this lunatic hang!" he barks. (Too late for that, unfortunately: California stopped hanging people 70 years ago. Might a cop not know this?) Manning also has a suicidal wife and a daughter who hates him, but like several other plot oddments -- a gay detective who turns out not to be gay, for instance -- this has no bearing on the story.

Before long, Manning himself comes under suspicion of being the killer, in part because of his increasingly unhinged fixation on the original Jack the Ripper case. (It is a little creepy that he knows that London's Whitechapel district, the Ripper's favored killing ground, comprises exactly the same amount of acreage as West Hollywood -- but then how unsettling is it to imagine there could be anyone who would swallow such an unlikely factoid?)

Throughout all of this, the killer is little more to us than a pair of sinister boots and a black medical bag. And so having weathered a virtual tsunami of directorial incoherence -- arbitrary visual clichés of the clouds-speeding-across-the-sky variety, and some of the most inappropriate use of classical music in the history of movies, maybe -- by the end, we're eager to learn who this new Ripper is. And who is he? Nobody! Well, maybe. It's complicated. If only it were also interesting.

Don't miss Kurt Loder's review of [article id="1603391"]"Donkey Punch"[/article] and [article id="1603411"]"Inkheart,"[/article] also new in theaters this week.

Check out everything we've got on "The Lodger."

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