Another successful collaboration of Depp and Burton

Rating: 10/10 (29 April 2007)

The story is set in 1799, Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is a policeman in New York City who is different from his colleagues, he is far ahead of them in using science to solve crimes and not just using inhumane methods that the police in this time favour. His superiors send him to an isolated farming community called Sleepy Hollow where a series of gruesome murders have happened, victims have been found without their heads. The town council members tell Crane that a headless Hessian horseman is responsible for the crimes but Crane doesn't believe them and thinks it is a person alive who has killed the town's people but his beliefs are soon tested when he witnesses the headless horseman killing the Magistrate (Richard Griffiths). Crane carries on and finds a conspiracy that has been going on with the town council members who are now being killed and Crane must find the horseman's head to stop the killings.
Tim Burton immediately sets the mood of the film by making it very dark and Gothic which he always seems to be very good at doing. Danny Elfman helps Burton's direction with his music which just adds to the tension in the film.
One of the things I like about Johnny Depp's character Ichabod crane is that he is not your stereotypical hero, he is completely different from any other hero you have seen on film before. He is not macho, he is squeamish, he faints and is very eccentric compared to everyone else but it is only Depp that can make you watch a character like that and not be turned off by his feeble qualities. We see flashbacks of his traumatic childhood where his father was this fearsome man of God and his mother was a free spirit who was murdered by his father because he saw his wife as an evil witch.
The film keeps you guessing till the end. There is the secret that connects all the town council members and the victims of the horseman, the audience find that out in the middle of the film but it is also who is it killing the town's people? Is it an evil spirit or someone who is using the headless horseman to get their revenge on these people? There is misdirection about who it is, Burton puts a red herring in that it is Katrina Van Tassel (Christina Ricci) till we find out at the end, it is Katrina's stepmother (Miranda Richardson)who wanted revenge on the Van Garrets and Van Tassels who threw her family out and the people who stand in the way of her getting what she wants.
What is good about the end is Depp at the beginning of the film starts off as a loner but at the end of the film he has a family, Katrina and Young Masbeth (Marc Pickering) who share two things with one another, they have no living family left and have witnessed the events of Sleepy Hollow and who can never tell anyone else as they won't be believed especially in that time so can rely on one another as they have bonded over the horrors they saw in Sleepy Hollow.
Another interesting part of the film is that Crane uses science techniques that are unheard of in that era the film is set but it shows him as someone who has a modern approach to solving crimes, very much the way they are solved today. I have never seen this before in a period film and I think it was a good touch to show how brutal life was before the science techniques came into force and how people were bullied into signing confessions using brute force and torture back in the past.
The cast are amazing. Christopher Walken scares the bejesus out of me in his make up and looks so menacing as the headless horseman.
The special effects blew my mind, especially in scenes where it looks like a character has actually been decapitated and the scene where the horseman gets his head back and you see all the veins, tissue and skin building on the skull till the transformation is complete and you are looking at Christopher Walken, back from the dead. The writing by Kevin Yagher/Andrew Kevin Walker just makes this Ichabod more better and interesting than the other films which have featured the Crane character. I would also like to mention the Cinematography by Emmanuel Lubezki and Film Editing by Chris Lebenzon and Joel Negron who just helped to make the film first rate.