Rivulets of blood run through Tim Burton's gloriously sanguine adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. As ghoulish as it is lyrical, the movie version of Sweeney Todd represents the perfect confluence of source material, talent and sensibility.

Those familiar with Burton's body of work and penchant for creating dark entertainments can understand why Sondheim would entrust the filmmaker with his masterpiece, which opened on Broadway in 1979. Yet only upon viewing the finished product does it become clear how ideal a marriage it was. Burton amplifies the grim essence of the tale, based on a stock figure from English lore, with bombastic glee. In turn, the movie feels like the apotheosis of his artistic temperament and style.

With Mr. Sondheim's blessing, drastic cuts were made to the score and book. The chorus was done away with, as were five major songs and substantial portions of numerous others. Dariusz Wolski's camerawork and Chris Lebenzon's editing create a uniquely cinematic rhythm that more than compensates for the missing material while matching the remaining music.

Adding to the symbiosis, Burton enlisted Johnny Depp to limn the vengeful tonsil slitter. Their previous collaborations include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Sleepy Hollow, and Ed Wood, although Edward Scissorhands will most readily spring to mind watching this hauntingly melodic tragedy.

It isn't for the squeamish or anyone seeking quaint musical theater; however, none can deny its aesthetic integrity and stunning execution. Contemporary without being gimmicky, Dickensian without being too familiar, it transports you to a circle of hell where rage-filled victims boil alongside those who did them wrong. 

Depp plays Benjamin Barker, the Victorian-era London barber framed by the lecherous Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) and sent to a penal colony so Turpin could have his way with Barker's pregnant wife Lucy (Laura Michele Kelly). Returning after fifteen years, Barker learns that Lucy poisoned herself. Assuming a new identity as Sweeney Todd, he opens a barbershop in his old premises above the establishment of Mrs. Nellie Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter) purveyor of putrid meat pies. When he discovers that his daughter is now Turpin's ward, his drive for revenge intensifies. 

Rickman, along with Timothy Spall as his creepy sidekick Beadle Bamford and Sacha Baron Cohen in the role of Italian poseur Pirelli, feeds the movie's inexorable flow of perversion. Bonham Carter's wistful and sarcastic turn as Lovett, while vocally undistinguished, has a complexity that goes beyond any music hall characterization.

Along with Depp's brooding portrayal, these excellent performances give Burton the freedom to expose the mechanisms of death and squalor -- whether they be the cockroaches infesting Lovett's pies, the city's fetid sewers, asylums and workhouses, or the murders perpetrated by Todd wielding his gleaming blades. We go into the basement where Todd's victims descend after fateful visits to his tonsorial chair and before passing through the meat-grinder supplying the fillings for Lovett's suddenly tasty comestibles. 

In addition to the stomach-churning by-products of villainy, Burton relishes teasing out the sexual currents in Turpin's twisted desires and Bamford's sadism, in the attraction between the young sailor who returns with Todd (Jamie Campbell Bower) and his teen daughter Johanna (Jayne Wisener), and, most of all, in the eroticism of the killings themselves.

During the key murder montage, blood splatters on Todde, on a photo of his wife and child, and even on the camera lens. Burton picked an artificial, slightly fluorescent hue for the blood to mitigate the gore factor and to indicate there's nothing naturalistic or offhand about his choices.

From the movie's opening organ blast to the pieta with which it ends, Sweeney Todd is a formally precise artwork about vice washing away virtue. This fundamental movement is expressed in Sondheim's brilliant score and in the sublime way Burton manipulates darkness and light, creating chiaroscuro streaked with crimson. 

(Released by DreamWorks Pictures and rated "R" for graphic bloody violence.)