Summaries

Synopsis

Set in the late 19th Century of London, England, Sweeney Todd is a homicidal barber who teams up with Maggie Lovett, a woman who runs a bakery just down the street from his barber shop, to commit a series of brutal and gory murders of Sweeney's customers and people at random. Sweeney first slashes the throat of a friendly barbershop customer from Ireland and then hacks off the guy's finger to get at a gold ring with a valuable ruby on it for money. Tobias Ragg, an employee of Maggie's bakery, arrives to deliver the dead body though a back alley to Maggie's bakery where Tobias then hacks up the bodies to make Maggie's special "meat pies" for profit, and which has made Maggie's bakery the best place to eat on Fleet Street.

Maggie employs Johanna Jeffrey, a young woman as a cashier and saleslady, but she is not let in on the plan. Johanna is also employed to care for Maggie's invalid husband, who resides upstairs in the flat above the bakery since Maggie ignores him in favor of her business. When Maggie closes up the shop early, Johanna deals with Tobias' girlfriend, Rosie, a ill-tempered, foul-mouthed Cockney woman who shows up looking for Tobias to give her more spending money, while afterwards, another customer arrives demanding her money back when she found some hair in one of Maggie's kidney mincemeat pies. When Johanna finally closes up the shop for the day, her boyfriend Jarvis Williams, arrives from being away at sea and proposes marriage to her. Johanna accepts and they cement their bond by having sex in a back storage room.

Meanwhile, Sweeney is revealed to be having an affair of his own with Anna, a singer and dancer who works at a seedy burlesque club. Sweeney tries to get Anna to quit her job because her boss, Mr. Fisk, treats her badly, but Anna refuses unless Sweeney makes her promise to leave his drunkard and miserable wife, Becky, but Sweeney refuses as well. Mr. Fisk enters demanding that Sweeney leave Since Anna is scheduled to go on stage soon, which leads to a fistfight which is broken up by Corky, the drag queen MC who tries to mend the situation the best he can.

Sweeney goes home where he gets into another argument with Becky over his alleged infidelity and that they have little in the way of funds to get by. Sweeney can no longer stand Becky's nagging and finally manages to strangle her to death, and then hides the body away.

Meanwhile, Tobias walks in the shop just as Jarvis is leaving following his tryst of sex with Johanna where he sends the guy off and makes sexual advances at Johanna. She is put off by his arrogant and brutish approach and instead tends to Maggie's husband, Mr. Lovett. When Johanna leaves to go home for the day, Tobias goes upstairs and hacks off Mr. Lovett's hands as he tries to walk from his bed to the bathroom, and then takes his dead body down into the basement as another body for Mrs. Lovett's meat pies.

The next day, Jarvis arrives at Sweeney's barbershop where Sweeney is handing over to Tobias the latest loot he took from his latest victims, when Jarvis asks for a haircut. Sweeney instead knocks Jarvis out and has Tobias take him though the back door to Maggie's bakery.

After arriving home, Tobias gets into an argument with Rosie over her needs and he suggests that they go away for a while, and after he gets her to write a note to her employer about wanting to take a few days off work, Tobias stabs Rosie to death and then disembowels her before taking her over to Maggie's bakery for this latest addition to Maggie's meat pies.

Sweeney goes over to the burlesque club where he again tries to persuade Anna to leave with him, but when she refuses yet again and tells him that her interests in him are based on sex, and nothing more, Sweeney stabs her to death, when Mr. Fisk walks in. Sweeney knocks him out and places the knife in his hands to make it look that Mr. Fisk killed Anna.

When Johanna shows up at the bakery asking about Jarvis' whereabouts, Maggie claims to not to know anything about it. Worried about her fiancee's disappearance, Johanna goes to the police to report her suspicious about Maggie's baker as well as Tobias. Just then one of Maggie's customers arrives after finding a female breast in one of Maggie's meat pies and the police inspector begins to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

Meanwhile, Sweeney goes over to Maggie's flat where he expresses his worry about the events happening and they have sex. Tobias arrives shortly after where he demands that they kill Jarvis still tied up in the basement and leave town as people are getting suspicious to the many disappearances all over the neighborhood. Maggie agrees and tells Tobias to kill Jarvis before closing up shop for good and hopefully to make it out of the country. But Maggie secretly tells Sweeney to kill Tobias since she feels that the mental unstable guy will become a liability to them.

In the basement of Maggie's bakery, when Sweeney and Tobias are going to kill Jarvis, Tobias figures out that Sweeney and Maggie are going to betray and kill him, gets into a vicious fight with Sweeney in which the two bloodthirsty butchers hack each other to death. Just then, a huge mob of townspeople burst into Maggie's bakery forcing her to flee into the basement to witness Sweeney and Tobias in their last bouts when the mob breaks into the basement, and beat Maggie to death, while Jarvis is freed.

Reunited with Johanna, Jarvis plans to leave England with her and to go America to settle on a ranch out in the Wild West. A woman arrives to give the newlyweds a wedding gift which turns out to be a meat pie that she stole from Maggie's bakery just before the mob destroyed it. Johanna and Jarvis decline it.