Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a dark and terrifying love story, as much a horror film as a musical extravaganza.

Johnny Depp stars as Benjamin Barker, a man unjustly sent to prison by an evil judge in lust with his wife. Fifteen years later, Barker returns to London having taken the name Sweeney Todd, and is told by his old landlord, Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), that his wife took her own life after being raped by Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman). Todd’s then-infant daughter is now the beautiful Joanna (Jayne Wisener), and lives as the judge’s ward. Vowing revenge, Todd reopens his barbershop above Mrs. Lovett’s Meat Pie Shop and considers how he can be reunited with his child. But when his best laid plans go awry, Todd’s vengeance spills over from those who wronged him onto all of humanity. By day, Todd cuts the throats of those who sit in his chair and at night his accomplice, Mrs. Lovett (who must be a fan of Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”) grinds their bodies into her meat pies and serves them to an unsuspecting public.

Sweeney Todd is the big-screen adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning Broadway musical. Who knew that serial killing and cannibalism could form the basis for a hit show? Director Tim Burton, for whom the last decade and a half has not been kind, returns to his place of macabre notoriety with a mighty and gore-splattered roar. In Sweeney Todd, our most gothic of directors paints in blood, creating the sort of film out of which you walk in awestruck admiration, frightened that a work of such unrelenting savagery should inspire anything other than revulsion and disgust.

The cast is flawless. Depp, in his sixth collaboration with Burton and certainly the director’s alter ego if ever he had one, dazzles, as always, by playing a ghastly version of an earlier role — only this time Edward Scissorhands carves human flesh instead of shrubbery. Carter, as the amorous yet witchy pie maker, proves once again that she was right to walk away from Merchant/Ivory stereotypes. Rickman continues to show why no one, but no one, plays villainy better. Timothy Spall, as Turpin’s wicked associate, Beadle Bamford, is deliciously repellent. And Sacha Baron Cohen, fresh from Borat, is the codpiece flaunting, flamboyant fop and rival barber, Signor Adolfo Pirelli.

While none of the actors are especially remarkable singers — they were chosen for their dramatic talents, not their voices — they nonetheless do a remarkable job of interpreting Sondheim’s melodies with both gusto and nuance. Very little of the script is spoken; most is sung in Sondheim’s counterpoint-heavy, angular harmonies and reoccurring leitmotifs that make up in sheer power what they lack in sing-ability.

The film might as well be in black and white. The color pallet is so drained of any sort of color (except in sequences that take place as flashbacks or fantasy-forwards) that when the blood begins to geyser, it is a shocking, horrific affront to our visual senses. That the artificially crimson, impressionistic gore never looks quite real certainly doesn’t make the scenes in which it figures any less squeamish-inducing.

There is something positively Biblical about Sweeney Todd. Todd’s words, sung as he contemplates eviscerating the necks of all those unlucky enough to sit in his barber’s chair, mirror those of the Scriptures when they proclaim humanity as a wretched race which has fallen far short of God’s righteous standards and without some sort of atonement, deserves death. But in Todd’s universe there is no atonement, no Christ, no redemption. There is only the straight razor of divine judgment, supple throats and spewing fountains of blood.

Consider Todd’s words:

There’s a hole in the world like a great black pit
And it’s filled with people who are filled with shit
And the vermin of the world inhabit it.
But not for long…

They all deserve to die.
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.
Because in all of the whole human race
Mrs Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two
There’s the one they put in his proper place
And the one with his foot in the other one’s face
Look at me, Mrs Lovett, look at you.

Now we all deserve to die
Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why.
Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief
For the rest of us death will be a relief
We all deserve to die.

Like so many films this year, Sweeney Todd is a pervasively bleak and pessimistic film with a nihilistic view of human nature. Justice is a myth and unrestrained tyranny is held at bay only by the genocidal actions of a man overcome by grief and insanity. Innocence is an illusion, a delusional state to be caged and killed.

Although Sweeney Todd insists evil must be punished, it exists in a world in which none are blameless and all worthy of condemnatory rage. While Todd starts out as a sympathetic figure, an innocent man wronged and warped by the hideous monstrosity of others, he does not remain there long. You may genuinely feel for Todd, but like a diseased animal, you also know he must be destroyed.

In the opening moments of the film, we watch the ship bearing Todd back to London from the penal colony in Australia, slide into the London harbor. Standing beside our protagonist is a seaman named Anthony Hope (Jamie Campbell Bower), who later falls in love with Joanna. He sings of London as a place a wonder and promise. But we see London as Todd sees it — a city of unrelenting grisliness, soot, grime and sinister shadow. At the close of the film, when revenge has quenched its thirst with its own blood, and Hope has rescued Joanna from Turpin’s clutches, we never cut back to the young couple, though their subplot and, indeed, presence, is inexorably intertwined with the events of the final moments. That we never see them again leaves the film without an important sense of narrative and emotional closure. Either their erasure is an editing blunder or it is Burton’s way of telling us that, in the end, there is literally no Hope.

© Copyright 2007 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.