Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Cert. 18, 116 mins
Stars: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen, Edward Sanders, Jayne Wisener, Jamie Campbell Bower
Directed by Tim Burton

A GHOULISHLY compelling Victorian horror story, and a film director with an unrepentant gothic passion for the macabre may sound like a marriage made in heaven (or hell). But what happens when the issue of that fiendish union is a musical?

But Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is not your average musical. And Tim Burton is not your average filmmaker.

Based on Stephen Sondheim's award-winning 1979 musical the same name, Burton takes Sondheim's magnificently eclectic, bitingly satirical score and uses it to bring to life a terrible and bloody tale of corruption, crushed innocence, insanity, serial murder and cannibalism.

And he does so with a spectacular visual flair, buckets of blood and a deliciously wicked sense of the blackest gallows humour.

Many will be familiar with the infamous 18^th Century exploits of Sweeney Todd - the so-called Demon Barber - who gave a whole new meaning to a close shave with an extremely sharp cut-throat razor and his enterprising landlady who served his unfortunate customers up as pies in her shop.

But Burton has a soft spot for a certain type of monster. Instead of the gruesome exploits of a pair of avaricious murderers he gives us a very human tragedy of lost love and the devastating consequences of obsessive revenge.

The bombast and sheer theatricality of Sondheim's songs remain, but in using actors who can sing rather than singers who act, the emphasis here is on dramatic performance and story rather than song. This is further ensured by paring down the musical numbers to their most basic and potent elements – there are no singing crowds, or OTT choral refrains. The songs are worked into the drama, it doesn't stop for them.

An excellent cast includes: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen.

Benjamin Barker (Depp) an honest barber is happily married to the beautiful Lucy (Laura Michelle Kelly). They live a happy, simple life with their baby daughter until they are torn apart by the depraved lust of the rich and powerful Judge Turpin (Rickman), who has designs on Lucy.

Barker is arrested on a trumped-up charge and summarily deported to Australia.

Escaping 15-years later, Barker returns to London as Sweeney Todd, a shadow of his former self, to discover that his family is gone. His loyal Landlady Mrs Lovett (Bonham Carter) returns his precious razors, which she has devotedly guarded, with the devastating news that Lucy poisoned herself after a horrific encounter with the Judge and his depraved friends. His now grown-up daughter Johanna (Wisener) is the unwilling ward of the corrupt Turpin, who lusts after her as he once lusted after her mother.

Consumed by rage, Sweeney swears vengeance, and woe betide any who cross his path.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street will not be to everyone's taste. Anyone who has seen Burton's Sleepy Hollow will have an idea what to expect. This is a darkly macabre film; the combination of beautifully orchestral song and the literal explosions of arterial blood from slashed throats is truly disturbing and often alarmingly comic.

Production designer Dante Ferretti and Director of photography Dariusz Wolski have created a wonderful, highly stylised gothic cityscape full of filthy claustrophobic streets, impossibly angled rooms, yawning sewers and terrifyingly threatening everyday appliances. London through Sweeney’s eyes is a vice ridden pit where those in power take pleasure in destroying those without any.

The almost monochromatic palette of blacks and greys, make the sudden splashes of scarlet blood all the more shocking and make colourful scenes of the happier past look all the more jarring. It also gives a bizarre dreamlike quality to Mrs Lovett's blue-skied fantasies of an imagined blissful future.

Costume designer Colleen Atwood kits out the cast in a fabulous variety of gothic grandeur which along with corpse pale, hollow-eyed complexions and a series of amazingly outrageous hairstyles make the Adams family look positively mundane.

The only spots of light are those lucky enough not to have yet been corrupted. Johanna (Wisener) and her young protector Anthony (Jamie Campbell Bower) can only escape by literally trying to escape from London before it is too late.   

The gory heart of the proceedings is Johnny Depp who excels as the homicidally driven Todd. His consuming obsession for revenge puts him on a tragic path that annihilates everything he was and any future he may have. So enmeshed is he with death he is no longer truly alive. Depp sings the role with a surprisingly good voice, bringing a melodic hard edge that spookily imitates David Bowie at times.

He is ably supported by Bonham Carter who is excellent as the amoral yet oddly sweet Mrs Lovett, who daydreams of a lovely live by the sea with Sweeney as she happily prepares her latest batch of pies with her innocent adopted street urchin, Toby (an angelically voiced Edward Sanders), blissfully ignorant of their special ingredients.

Alan Rickman is creepily evil as Turpin, the seemingly pious Judge who takes perverse delight in abusing his power, although he is sadly, a little underused. Timothy Spall is truly repellent as his oily, sadistic side-kick, Beadle Bamford. Sacha Baron Cohen is flamboyantly pompous the boastful Adolfo Pirelli, who comes to a sticky end after trying to blackmail Sweeney.

This is a bloody, brilliant cautionary tale of a good man who gives himself so totally over to his dark side's raging hate, that it eventually consumes him too.