The Demon Barber and His Deserters

People were leaving before the second act. Not angrily—just rising from their seats with the quiet dignity of people who’d miscalculated and were cutting their losses. That was, honestly, the best possible advertisement for Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd.

After The Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride, I thought I had a reasonable idea of the general shape of what I was walking into. I was wrong. Sweeney Todd is a full-throated horror musical, and it doesn’t apologize for either half of that description. Johnny Depp plays the barber returning to Victorian London for revenge, who eventually goes into business with Helena Bonham Carter’s resourceful pie-maker. The blood is operatic and abundant. The singing is more committed than you expect. There’s a small perpetually drunk boy who wanders through the story trilling songs that seem to belong to a different, gentler film—which makes what happens to him considerably bleaker.

The people who left probably came in expecting something like Edward Scissorhands: dark and stylized but ultimately cuddly. What they got instead was a film that takes its genre seriously enough to actually disturb you. Burton strips the warmth from Sondheim’s musical and replaces it with cold blue London light and an unblinking relationship with gore. It’s a love story where the love poisons everything it touches, and the film is honest enough not to offer a way out of that.

Ninety percent of a standard Friday-night cinema audience is not the target audience. If you went in expecting something warm and whimsical, the exit was to the left. Everyone else got something genuinely strange—which is all I wanted.