These seemingly directionless elaborations, you realize happily at the end, are all part of a grand design. The director wraps up all the intentionally frayed loose ends and cleverly dropped clues in an impressively tight, albeit overly direct, resolution. This finely crafted mystery within the spectacle of it all proves that while almost all of the onscreen characters lose their heads, Burton keeps his screwed on tight.
If you do choose to see it, in all its blood-spattered craftiness and enveloping spookiness, just remember -- it's only a movie; you can rest assured your head isn't going to get chopped off. Although exposure to the shadowy twists and turns of Burton's imagination, inside-John-Malkovich-style, might make it spin.
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