For the most part, though, British hospital buildings have been determinedly grim - designed, as if carelessly, to make patients feel worse rather than better.
While this sequel revisits similar territory to that of the first film, Wan brings a tension here that is every bit as oppressive as the effectively grim 1970s production design.
But as dispiriting as they are, the grim portraits are designed to seize the attention and prompt an active response.
He is also one of seven so-called Ghetto Kids: dolls whose background histories are grim fairy tales designed to educate young people about the perils of the world.
Set in and around the northern port city of Tianjin, and largely taking place on brutally ugly expressways and country highways, it's a grim, complex, meticulously designed story about drug dealers and police officers from different jurisdictions who pursue them up and down the country.
Parking garages, the grim afterthought of American design, call to mind many words.
"This part of London is under siege," said Cecil, who described the new design as grim.
Dwarfed by John Gunter's design of grim, towering, parking-lot-grey, Whishaw comes on as completely vulnerable and thoroughly adolescent, holding himself apart from everything around him and yet disturbed by it all.
At the age of 80, Ken Loach returns to an arena of British social outrage he first occupied with pictures such as Poor Cow and Cathy Come Home; he and screenwriter Paul Laverty take up the idea that the benefits system has been repurposed as the 21st-century workhouse in our age of austerity: made deliberately grim, to deter or design out all but the most deserving poor.
Once the grim, chastising superego of product design, sustainability has become delightful.
The basic set by Christian Schmidt, who is also responsible for the costumes, is of the grim, brick-wall school of design prevalent in current productions; possibly, it depicts an asylum, though we never really know.
