Directed by Tim Burton
Written by Stephen Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler, Christopher Bond, John Logan
Starring: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall, Sacha Baron Cohen, Jamie Campbell Bower, Laura Michelle Kelly, Jayne Wisener, Ed Sanders
“There was a barber and his wife, and she was beautiful…”The story of Sweeney Todd was a story of lust, betrayal and revenge. Sweeney Todd’s mind was bent on revenge after his wife and daughter had been coveted by a corrupt judge, and himself unjustly hurled into prison. The plot was strikingly similar to Alexandre Dumas’s epic novel The Count of Monte Cristo, hence articulating certain espousals of the traditional revenge plot. Yet while there were strong intertextual echoes to Dumas’s novel, Tim Burton’s stylistic play with colours created a gruesome, bleak, gothic atmosphere within the film. The dark, moody aura signified London as a cannibalistic society, “a hole in the world like a great black pit and the vermin of the world inhabit it”. The setting predicated the mode of revenge in the film: the inevitable brutality and ferociousness.
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