It seems that with every new incarnation in popular culture, Victorian-era London gets another thick coat of grime and gloom. In Tim Burton's screen adaptation of Steven Sondheim's grisly musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the director takes relish in keeping things particularly grimy and gloomy.

There's a hole in the world like a great black pit/and the vermin of the world inhabit it/. and it goes by the name of London." This may sound a jaundiced view, but comes from the titular anti-hero (Johnny Depp) who has reasons to be bitter: he's just returned having spent the last 15 years as a felon shipped off to Australia, falsely charged by the lecherous judge who coveted his wife. And when he discovers that his wife poisoned herself in his absence and his child has been taken as a ward by the very judge that sentenced him, he's out for revenge.

When Todd kills his first victim in a fit of rage, it is Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), the companionable and 'sensible' baker who devises the modest proposal to use the corpse to supply ingredients for her hitherto notoriously bad pies. And since Depp is initially thwarted in achieving his revenge on the judge, he turns his murderous attention to his customers, providing an abundant supply of meat to Mrs. Lovett. In her business and practical arrangement with the murderous barber above her establishment, Mrs. Lovett imagines and yearns for a kind of perverse domestic bliss, rounded up by the young Tobi (Ed Walters), the erstwhile assistant to one of Todd's victims who she takes in as an oblivious help. For a while the three of them have a semblance of happiness in a bustling satire of commerce (she does brisk business with her meat pies) and domesticity.

Depp, ghoulish with a gaunt pallor, is a portrait of a despairing and deranged man, at turns appearing tortured and demonic. His performance employs twitches and snarls to effectively convey a depth of emotion. Depp is good, very good; but I suspect he would eventually come across as stiff and tiresome without the glow of adulation from Bonham Carter as Mrs. Lovett. Bonham Carter imbues her character with a winning eroticism and yearning in the somewhat unrequited love she has for Todd. She also plays her character's pragmatism with a jocular levity that earns some of the movie's biggest laughs. The pair's chemistry-assisted by a generous script-outshines the other characters, making their storylines secondary despite some very good performances by the supporting cast.

This is a veritable Burton production, with a palette that is almost exclusively dark and gothic. In achieving that effect, much is owed to the magnificent stagecraft. It is a grin- and grimace-inducing sequence where after Todd slits the throat of his victim, he steps on a pedal to send the body tumbling down with a convincing and sickening thud into the kitchen floor of Mrs. Lovett below. But Burton is also concerned with exploring the deep complexities of the human psyche. There is no redemption in this story and Todd remains a monster, but he is a human monster, and one that we might actually pity.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Director: Tim Burton
Cast: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Ed Walters, Alan Rickman, Timothy Spall
2007. R. 116 min