Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen

Director: Tim Burton

Trust Tim Burton to take a musical and make it the stuff of gorgeous nightmares. In Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, he takes Stephen Sondheim’s award-winning, super-successful Broadway musical of the same name and gives it a grand treatment that is breathtaking. Never has so much blood been let so artfully since the director’s take on the headless horseman in Sleepy Hollow.

It comes as no surprise that Dante Ferretti took the Academy Award for best achievement in art direction for the movie.

Johnny Depp is the actor who seems the most capable of executing Burton’s Gothic vision and this movie is the actor and director’s sixth collaboration. From the twisted fairytale of the misunderstood man-child in Edward Scissorhands to the retelling of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, where Depp’s creepy confectioner seemed inspired by Michael Jackson, the two have pushed the envelope of creativity. Here Depp plays Benjamin Barker, a barber who is wrongfully accused by the lascivious Judge Turpin who lusts after Barker’s wife. Barker is deported to Australia and when he returns to London, he has only one wish — vengeance.

He sets himself up as Sweeney Todd, a barber who litters his route to Judge Turpin with corpses of all unfortunate enough to cross his path. He is assisted by Mrs. Lovett, who finds an ingenious way of getting rid of the bodies — by turning them into mince pies. In all this depravity, the young lovers, Joanna (Barker’s daughter, who is Turpin’s ward) and a young sailor, seem doomed from the word go.

Burton’s camera does not look away as the bodies are sliced and diced and fall down Todd’s diabolic chute with sickening thuds. But if this be madness, there is a glorious method in it, which has to be marvelled at. The senses are assaulted with a barrage of images with a terrible beauty all of their own.

And if you thought songs have no place in a movie about serial killers and cannibalism, perish the thought. Depp’s voice might not be as full as would be the norm, but his slightly thin voice has an edge, which gives a rock-like sound and creates a whiplash effect.

In a movie replete with gothic tropes, Depp’s finely-tuned performance and a lush operatic score, it would take actors of some calibre to make their presence felt.

There is Helena Bonham Carter as the ghoulish Mrs. Lovett, Alan Rickman as Turpin, Timothy Spall as the ferret-like Beadle and Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat”) as the rival barber Signor Adolfo Pirelli. Sweeney Todd is a triumphant marriage of content and style and earns whole-hearted applause for it.

MINI ANTHIKAD-CHHIBBER

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