Think of "Edward Scissorhands" gone pitch-black, a red rain falling.
Replace Johnny Depp's innocent blade-artist driven out of a pastel town full of
philistines with mad, bad Sweeney Todd (aka
... more Benjamin Barker), another kind of
cutter entirely. Wronged by society, poisoned by rage at a squalid city that's
"a hole in the world like a great black pit, filled with people who are filled
with s---," Depp's barber resembles a blasted angel, his corpse-white face
frozen in a rictus of scorn, his voice as hard and rasping as a dull knife.
There's no way out, no salvation possible, in this bleak musical, a Hobbesian
nightmare where it's all dog eat dog and survival of the fittest. Mrs. Lovett
(Helena Bonham Carter), grown rich off savory human-meat
pies, may fantasize a grotesque tableau of connubial bliss all she likes, but
Sweeney's fury and despair blight everything he touches -- he's the equivalent
of a great plague, infecting all of London and killing off every form of love.
(Paramount Pictures)Close
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