Marcel Winatschek

Depp in Wonderland

The first stills came out - Tim Burton’s Alice with Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. By that point the casting felt inevitable: of course Depp, of course Burton. They’d figured out their language after Sweeney Todd, that shorthand between a director who thinks in silhouettes and an actor who can make himself look like one. Mia Wasikowski as Alice, this quiet Australian actress I didn’t know, strange in just the right way.

What interested me was whether Burton could find anything new in the material. Alice is already weird, already cruel, already exactly what a Tim Burton film should be. So what does he do with it? Make it bigger? Push it further? The images looked right, but that’s not the same as knowing where he’s going.