Such good players so ill-spent

Rating: 6/10 (30 June 2016)

Such excellent players like Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are ill-spent in this not better than fair movie. The best of it is the Victorian London atmosphere in interiors, exteriors and clothes, aristocratic and popular. The story in itself is somewhat abstruse. A corrupt judge is aroused by the beautiful wife of a barber and to be able to take hold of her has her husband imprisoned on a false accusation and sent to deportation. He comes back fifteen years later with a false identity and wants to take his revenge on the judge. The next episodes are grandguignolesque and somewhat incomprehensible filled with several murders of the barber's clients in the barber's shop he had installed in the first floor of a confectionery owned by a woman with whom he starts a love relationship. He cuts their throats while pretending to shave them. The victims' bodies are used by that woman to bake meat pies. Among other things, what is strange is that no friends or relatives ever turned up to query about those disappearances. The barber ends up by getting hold of the judge after attracting him to the barber shop on a false promise and he cuts his throat there. And from horrifying scene to horrifying scene everything turns out badly to the barber, his companion and even his wife that appears in the end and who he thought was dead a long time ago. He cuts her throat too since he didn't recognize her and thought she was the beggar in whom she had changed herself. Awful indeed.