Sweeney Todd

Benjamin Barker - Johnny Depp - is Sweeney Todd, a grieved genius who reaches the peaks of creativity and pain, always in touch with his wounded soul. Todd’s character has a disenchanted gaze on the world, the look of a man who, at one time, expected it all and today cannot live with the nothing he’s got.

Sweeney Todd is a restless man hungry for revenge. In a leaden landscape that tells the inferno of the living in all its tragic nature, ambiguous, violent and sad figures move.

In a world where the strong ruthlessly crush the weak and the weak succumb with no dignity, Todd and Nellie make their fortune on the metaphor of life where each being devours the other with no morals or honour, with no pity or respect, even towards innocence. In this motion picture by Tim Burton the themes of Shakespearean tragedy become the driving force of a gruesome tale that presents a pessimistic view of life and of human relationships, and also tells about how hatred and the desire for revenge can become, for men, a kind of autoimmune disease, up to devouring them and letting them lose the very reasons of their existence

(the following reveals the plot)

This is how Todd becomes the victim of his own haunted world, alive and then savagely murdered by the hand of innocence that, however and despite all, seems to be the only value able and worthy of surviving.

Benjamin Barker, a talented barber of late-18th century London, is unjustly sentenced and jailed by judge Turpin. Released after 15 years, Barker goes to his old home, where he finds Nellie Lovett; in her youth, she had been hopelessly in love with him and is now the owner of a wretched inn. After recognizing him, Nellie reveals to Benjamin the tragic end of his wife who, after being raped by the judge, committed suicide. The judge has had Barker’s daughter, young Joanna, put in confinement. Barker becomes Sweeney Todd. Todd and Nellie open an anthropophagous restaurant fed by the continuous homicides Todd commits while working as a barber…

Traduzione di Silvia Cattaneo