Director Gore Verbinski takes the campy dread of Hammer horror films (Horror of Dracula, et alia) and builds it into a a gorgeous, epic assault on anti-immigration sentiments in Europe and elsewhere. Yes, it’s long and indulgent, littered with loose ends, unexplained details, and a few outright absurdities. But despite all that, it’s solidly built, masterful with mood, and just plain wonderful to look upon. Dane DeHaan (looking enough like Leo DiCaprio to recall 2010’s Shutter Island) plays an ambitious Young Turk sent to retrieve his boss from a wellness spa in the Swiss Alps. The big guy’s needed back at the office to make a merger go through, but his last letter home was an extended diatribe echoing the spa director’s thoughts on soul-sick modernity and its endless striving for money and power. (He’s not entirely wrong, of course, but then, the devil has been known to speak truth when it serves his purpose.) Once there, DeHaan finds it increasingly difficult to leave: there’s an accident, and there’s a girl, and something weird is going on, something involving eels... I’d say this big-budget B movie puts the “grand” back into “Grand Guignol,” if it weren’t for the earnest moral condemnation at its heart: that the real crime against nature is the use of the world’s wretched refuse to prop up a madman’s dream of civilization. (2017) — Matthew Lickona