Much has been made of the gore in Tim Burton’s film version of Sweeney Todd, which seems to me to be a bit hysteric. If you’ve seen one contemporary cinematic blood bath, you’ve seen them all, and if you produced mathematical proof that there’s more blood here per minute of running time than in, say, Hostel II (from which Burton, actually rather worryingly, borrows the device of spurting corpse-as-shower), I’d be surprised. In fact, blood doesn’t make an appearance until fairly far into the film, and at least initially, the focus is not on the wounds of the victim, but on the assailant’s rage.

Like Atonement, this season’s other high-profile adaptation of a highbrow contemporary text once thought to be unadaptable, Burton’s crack at Sweeney Todd works best when it serves to support the inherent perversity of its source. The director’s mashup of Steven Sondheim’s musical with his own, patented, teenage Goth sketchbook aesthetic may play like German Expressionists-do-Torture Porn, but the brutality is mostly farce. As in Sondheim, Burton’s Sweeney Todd is most disturbing when it’s talking about love.

The most impressive thing about Burton’s film may be its seamlessness. It’s wall-to-wall exposition, but as the storytelling voice drifts back and forth between public conversation and private monologue, sometimes in the middle of a verse, it plays as pure spectacle. Though Sondheim’s score has been abridged to the point where there’s no room for the title song, in “The Ballad of Sweeney Todd”’s absence, there are several standout setpieces that could suitably stand on their own as the thesis of the show. Each one is, in some way, about the sick delusions of desire.

The first, and darkest, of these numbers is “My Friends” (see a portion embedded above), in which Helena Bonham Carter’s Mrs. Lovett sings a love song about Johnny Depp’s Sweeney, who is in turn singing a love song to his long lost knife. “We’re together, and we’ll do wonders,” he sings, eyes fixed on the blade, Carter’s ratty head peeking over his shoulder in gloomy adoration. Her gaze is absolutely transfixing in its creepiness, not just because she’s pledging her undying affection to a guy who would seem to rather spend the night with his knife. We’re watching her realize that love means accepting another’s obsessions as if they were your own, even if that means implicating oneself in the other person’s crimes.

It’s actually a wonder that Sweeney fancies himself such an outlaw—as this number and the swoony “Pretty Women” prove, both his accomplice/love interest and his mortal enemy are as willing as he to kill in the name of love. It’s essentially desire, and the vanity that goes with it, that brings Sweeney’s victims into his barber shop; it’s their burning lust and longing that puts them at the mercy of Sweeney’s long-burning bloodlust. This is one of the great jokes of the material: good or evil, rich or poor, Sondheim says we’re all equally susceptible to the sick, potentially violent madness of love. Forget idle hands—the devil can do much more with unrequited passion.

But too bad about the casting. I don’t personally care that Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter can’t sing, and I don’t think Sondheim does much, either. His songs are too story-heavy to be done justice by a non-actor, and there’s a rough, natural quality to these non-singers’ performances that makes them feel almost anti-theatrical––almost, like genuine cries for help. But not quite. Burton ultimately sexes up the actual grotesquerie of the material in order to fashion better lifestyle porn for teenage Goths. These stars are simply too young and attractive. Depp looks more like a rock star than a murderous ex-con; Bonham Carter looks like an art school prom queen in Alexander McQueen. This London is supposed to be hell on Earth, but the depravity it contains seems more like a choice, and less like the endgame of ravaged souls and wasted lives.

Burton sort of dabbles in class consciousness–Depp allows Sweeney to come close to affirming his own life with the line, “Those up above will serve those down below”–but idea of the underprivileged enacting revenge for the imbalance of social conditions by very literally eating the rich never feels more profound than a punchline. There’s a lot to admire here, but the best of it is pure Sondheim, with mere embellishment from Burton. As with so many of this director’s films of the last decade, I was never able to shake the feeling that I was watching a protracted advertisement for an inevitable branded Halloween costume in a bag.