Please pay attention because this may never happen again:  the year’s best splatter movie is also the most exhilarating musical in recent memory.  And make no mistake—Tim Burton’s take on the stage classic is a full-blown horror movie, albeit filled with more coast-to-coast singing, and gorgeous music, than most other musicals.  The graphic violence will turn away—and turn off—some viewers, but it is not only integral to the story being told, but also fully delivers on the Grand Guignol elements that were always central to Stephen Sondheim’s vision.  At several points, there are close-range long takes on jets of blood straight out of an old school samurai-movie and cinematographer Dariusz Wolski even allows the red stuff to land on the lens more than once.  In short, Sweeney Todd’s set ends up looking like the kind of theme park that Dexter Morgan might design.  In a title sequence that honestly foreshadows what’s to come, streams of deep crimson run, drip, slide, and pool; they do everything but coagulate.  And for once this stylistic use of blood does not simply signal a slightly fetishistic bent in terms of the art direction:  the movie is actually intended to be a bloody drama, and makes no apologies about this fact from square one.

However, horror fans would do well to note that it is well into the movie before even the first such death occurs.  That hardly means, though, that a waiting-game takes place until then.  Rather, the gradual build-up of an overall atmosphere of menace and corruption (social, personal, and spiritual) is done in ways that are seldom less than compelling.  And even during the “slow” periods, when no on-screen deaths occur, there is enough voyeurism, cannibalism, quasi-incest, madness, and rape to make Sweeney Todd an extremely dark feature by any standard.  In fact, rarely has a Hollywood movie been so relentlessly suffused with shadow, both thematically and literally:  I’d like to comment on how meticulous and evocative the production design is, but things were honestly too dark for me to make it out most of the time.

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Yet like any truly accomplished director of horror, Burton knows enough to leaven the material with humor as needed to provide the proverbial relief valve for the audience.  And to my delight, the humor here was not of the self-indulgently quirky variety present in other Burton films but rather was true to the boldly iconoclastic black comedy of the source material.

  That is, Burton guides his cast, which includes Sacha Baron Cohen in a memorable role, to deliver expertly on the wide range of emotions that’s intrinsically part of the narrative.  Similarly, the director avoids Burton-izing the material as he did with the Batman films and Planet of the Apes.  Instead, this time he's chosen a story whose themes are a good match for his own preoccupations—the anti-hero with the shadowy past, the outsized tragic love story, and a faux-quaint Gorey-esque retro-Victorian approach to the macabre.  What makes Sweeney Todd work so well is that, unlike in a film such as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Burton doesn’t have to pump air into the story to get it to do all the things he wants it to.  This time you can tell that Burton is actually concerned about his adaptation doing justice to the original, not about outdoing or improving upon it.  And the result is a film that, for me, very clearly represents his one masterwork to date.

At the risk of sounding glib, I should say that it often seemed that half the filmmakers’ job was done as soon as the casting was complete.  In the title role, Johnny Depp delivers a hugely satisfying performance.  While his singing occasionally betrays a subtle rock ‘n roll lilt, it works nonetheless.  But what’s truly remarkable is that, apart from this movie, you rarely get the dual pleasure of watching someone act on film—and act this well—through the nuanced articulation of each line that’s being sung.  In other words, Depp is not taking a break from "acting" when he launches into song, but is actually extending the intensity of his performance.  Also to his credit, in a part that does have him scowling and gnashing his teeth much of the time, he does not engage in the kind of attention-getting “innovations” that detract from the picture as a whole a la Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  By this point in their collaboration, Burton has learned to make use not only of Depp’s presence and skill as an actor but also the aura he gives off as a star—there’s no tradeoff between these, as in previous outings.

Opposite Depp is Helena Bonham Cater, who handles the comedic and dramatic demands of her role with equal talent.  Her Mrs. Lovett is not a dotty old dingbat but more a lost soul of a Goth girl who hooks up with her damaged dream man—she's a not-too-distant relative of Fight Club’s Marla Singer.  And while Bonham Carter’s singing is certainly respectable, the limitations of her range are evident as well.  For example, when she sings, “These are probably the worst pies in London…!”, the words should soar—it’s part of the majestic irony of the boast—but her voice never gets quite airborne.  To be sure, she is wonderful at conveying the wit of Sondheim’s lyrics, but not the powerful swells of his music.

In closing I should probably admit that I saw that original Broadway production of Sweeney Todd roughly thirty years ago, and it made a deep impression on me.  While it’s an exaggeration to say that I’ve been waiting ever since for a movie adaptation to do it justice, there’s no question that I could never have imagined a more thrilling big screen version than this.