To paraphrase Tom Stoppard’s award winning play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” all good drama needs to blend elements of love, blood and rhetoric. Blood and love without the rhetoric, blood and rhetoric without the love, or all three concurrent or consecutive. But blood is compulsory. They’re all blood. Enter Sweeney Todd, stage right – legendary Victorian barber butcher whose thirst for vengeance against a libidinous court magistrate who stole his wife and daughter is matched only by a disturbing facility with a straight razor.

Adapted from composer legendaire Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 Broadway musical, the rhetoric here is, naturally, nearly all presented in verse. The principle characters reveal themselves and all their driving lusts and angers and desperations in fabulously intricate melodies which often twist together to then writhe apart again - belting out their innermost desires to the heavens above even as they scrape their lives away on the sooty, disease-ridden gutters of filthy old London Town.  By excising the street level choruses of the original stage production, and having only the principle characters sing their lines, director Tim Burton has not only hacked an hour from the original’s running time, but also effectively made the proceedings remarkably more intimate. As with most of Burton’s works, all the characters involved are outcasts, perverts and introverts of one kind or another, seething with secrets and inner turmoil, and it seems perfectly meet that we should learn their private plights from their own lips only. Also, by casting both leads as actors first, and singers second (though having appeared in a few screen musicals, neither Depp as Todd, nor Helena Bonham Carter as his saucy accomplice Mrs. Lovett have ever performed their own songs before) he’s effectively reinforced the intimacy and given something of a modern edge to their relationships both onscreen and with the audience. Giving a great sense of human scale to the otherwise vaulting issues at hand, their untrained voices actually support the story, instead of the story supporting their voices. It was a risky gamble, but here it really works.

One of the most interesting qualities of Sondheim’s work is that every key character, (nearly all of them evil of one flavor or another) function, or malfunction, at the mercy of love. Todd pines for his loves lost, Lovett burns for her love’s embrace, even the swine judge Turpin (the ever-slippery Alan Rickman) seems ruled by a true, if slimy and misguided, love for Todd’s daughter Johanna (who he’s kept locked in a gilded cage for the entirety of her fifteen years). Turns out that humankind’s loftiest emotion, even at its most romantic, can often result in corruption, deceit, and yes, murder.

Which brings us to the blood. It takes the story a good hour before the compulsory blood makes its entrance, but when it finally appears, it does so with great and violent command. Production designer Dante Farretti, who has previously worked on such other lush period pieces as “Age of Innocence” and “Gangs of New York”, adopts Burton’s familiarly pale palette of monochromatic grays and dismal browns for nearly all the costumes and sets, only to gleefully hose them down with copious syrupy sheets of shocking neon red from the throats of a dozen faceless innocents as they take the barbers chair. As Todd’s shining razors repeatedly slash, slice and dig deeply into the necks of his unshaven victims, the gore simply dominates the screen. Brutally evocative of exactly the old Hammer films Burton was raised on, it’s bright like fire and thick as paint - fantastic and unreal in both quantity and quality, taking on a character all its own. Amid all the pathos of the love and the rhetoric, Burton leaves no doubt here that the human heart’s primary function, at least on Fleet street, is for pumping blood. Gobs of it.

It would seem a little late in his career for Burton to take off the gloves. His infamous compulsion for diluting his famously macabre tendencies with purile silliness may have been exactly what initially attracted him to the concept of a horrific serial killer being described by lilting romantic ballads, but with “Sweeney Todd” he’s crafted his first honest-to-God horror film. This is a slasher picture in every way, which cuts even deeper for being a true work of art.