Like nearly every other horror-film serial killer, Sweeney starts out as a sympathetic figure. Once upon a time, he was a happy husband and father, until his lovely wife (Laura Michelle Kelly) caught the eye of a malignant judge (Alan Rickman), who transported the poor barber to Australia. Now, after many years, he has returned to find that his daughter, now a teenager, has become the judge's ward. Finding his old straight razors - "my friends" - under the floorboards of his former shop, Sweeney sets out to ensnare the judge, a project that requires the deaths of quite a few customers along the way.
"They'll never be missed," sings the practical Mrs Lovett. Sweeney's view is harsher, almost genocidal. "They all deserve to die," he says, looking out over the rooftops of the city. And Burton depicts those deaths ruthlessly.
It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I'm a little startled myself, but it's been a long time since a movie gave me nightmares. And the unsettling power of Sweeney Todd comes above all from its bracing refusal of any sentimental consolation, from Burton's willingness to push the most dreadful implications of the story to their blackest conclusions.
Sweeney Todd is a fable about a world from which the possibility of justice has vanished, replaced on one hand by vain and arbitrary power, on the other by a righteous fury that quickly spirals into madness. There may be a suggestion of hopefulness near the end, but you don't see hope on the screen. What you see is as dark as the grave. What you hear is equally infernal, except that you might also call it heavenly.
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