Review: ‘The Horror of Dolores Roach’ twists ‘Sweeney Todd’ into a deliciously absurd new recipe

Everyone knows the tale of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the classic musical adapted into the Oscar-winning blockbuster directed by Tim Burton with Johnny Depp in the title role, but have you heard about The Horror of Dolores Roach? Don’t worry, because if Prime Video’s upcoming series finds the size of audience it deserves, you will soon enough.

Adapted from the podcast of the same name and brought to the screen by Amazon and Blumhouse Television, the jet-black horror comedy is every bit as meta and self-referential as its source material, which was itself inspired by creator Aaron Mark’s one-woman off-Broadway play Empanada Loca, that was adapted into an audio drama (both of which starred Daphne Rubin-Vega, and is now a full-length series starring Justina Machado in the title role.

The story opens with an even more fourth wall-breaking wrinkle, one that sees the life and times of Dolores Roach being brought to life on the stage, only for Machado’s real deal to emerge backstage and tell the actress playing her that she got the story wrong, which for those keeping count equates to the star of a series based on a podcast inspired by a play gatecrashing the play based on the events that take place within the series, just to give you an inkling of how unhinged things are going to be.

Released after a 16 year-prison sentence, Delores returns to her now-gentrified neighborhood of Washington Heights without a penny to her name and in dire need of a purpose. Thankfully, her old drug-dealing contact Luis lets her live and work in the basement of his empanada store as a masseuse, before things go very wrong very quickly.

Machado is one of those actors that you’ve almost definitely seen in a movie or TV show at some point or another, but very rarely is she playing the leading role. If her work here is any indication, though, the floodgates are about to burst wide open. She’s tremendous as Dolores, managing to root her performance in genuine emotion and empathy while still managing to generate laughs, grimaces, winces, shocks, and even the odd stomach-churner or two.

A dark comedy about societal shifts, the struggles of the working class, murder, mayhem, and delicious savory baked goods wrapped up in lashings of blood and laugh-out-loud humor is a tricky balance to put it lightly, and it’s not one that The Horror of Dolores Roach manages to straddle from beginning to end. The podcast roots are on display through the over-explanations and frequent bursts of voiceover, but the hits still manage to outweigh the misses to ensure it elevates itself well beyond the confines of its origins.

The first couple of episodes are largely setup that introduces viewers to the key players in the story, but all bets are off when Marc Maron’s sniveling landlord Gideon Pearlman meets his end at Dolores’ hands while partaking in a massage. Devastated about the prospect of being put back behind bars having only just gotten out after a decade and a half, her dismay turns to outright confusion when Alejandro Hernandez’s Luis casually disposes of the body without even questioning the nature of a murder happening in his residence.

Dolores keeps telling herself she’s a good person, but the bodies piling up an alarming rate seem to suggest otherwise. However, thanks largely to Machado’s barnstorming work, there’s never any real danger that she’ll be viewed as the villain of the piece, despite being entirely complicit in virtually every major incident that unfolds throughout. It’s a sinister show, but it’s also preposterous at the same time, and that seesawing of tones is pivotal to your enjoyment of the project as a whole.

There’s also the cannibalistic elephant in the room – which may or may not dissuade you from ever eating an empanada again – but using it as the backdrop to the dynamics between the characters and the message of The Horror of Dolores Roach as a whole ensures that it won’t be remembered as “that show where people get eaten,” even if that’s most definitely one of its many core conceits.

It’s all handled in a fashion significantly tamer than you may be expecting, to be honest, and at times it does feel like stretching the podcast out to an entire eight episodes of television may have been one or two too many, even if they generally hover around 30 minutes in length. The initial framing device doesn’t always land the way it’s intended to, either, but if you can ignore a little in the way of repetition then there’s still more than enough to sink your teeth into.