Maybe if a movie says what it’s about five times (or more), that meaning does actually manifest. Such is the risky test of Candyman (in theaters August 27), a continuation of the story begun with the 1992 of the same title. The new film—from director Nia DaCosta with a script by DaCosta, Win Rosenfeld, and Jordan Peele—takes what was a rather one-sided consideration and turns its gaze toward the other facet.
The first film dealt with a white academic, Helen Lyle, investigating a legend born in the ruinously neglected Cabrini-Green housing project in Chicago, whose population was largely Black. Bernard Rose’s turgid, engrossing film was a standout in its day for melding gory frights with social commentary, but it was still a story told from a very familiar, and limited, perspective. Thus the 2021 Candyman, which examines the legacy of the titular vengeful ghoul from the point of view of Black Chicagoans maneuvering a changed city.
The Cabrini-Green towers have been demolished, the land repurposed for luxury condominiums during the city’s rapid gentrification. Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is an up-and-coming artist who’s moved into one of those finely appointed homes with his curator girlfriend, Brianna (Teyonah Parris). They are on haunted land—a fact immediately spelled out by Brianna’s brother, Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), who’s come over for dinner with his boyfriend. Troy tells Anthony and Brianna the tragic-creepy story of Helen’s descent, framing it as a wider narrative about the ravaging of urban Black communities and the furies unleashed by that pain.
This, of course, is what Candyman is about. But rather than threading that theme—all its sorrow, its terror, its terrible and damning implications—into the fabric of a scary movie, Candyman lays it all on top. The movie prefers to tell rather than show, making for an incomplete fusion of social commentary and gothic scares. The decision to put everything out there in plain text is understandable: especially post-Get Out, there has been an appetite for genre films, particularly horror, that are actually saying something about society. And the topics at hand in Candyman are as urgent as they come. What’s missing in DaCosta’s film, though, is a more thoughtful synthesis of message and medium.
What certainly isn’t missing is style. Just about every frame of DaCosta’s film is a grand visual moment, shot in grave and saturated hues. Candyman adeptly captures the lonely, fluorescent-lit murmur of city life, both the cold grandeur of high-rises and the shabby, forgotten corners closer to the ground. Her carefully composed shots (John Guleserian did the cinematography) have an enveloping pull, alluring and dreadful. When blood is splashed across the screen, it doesn’t arrive like an aberration, a substance invading the picture from without. Rather it seems that all this bright, awful matter is only rejoining the landscape, something elemental resurfacing and once again made undeniable. While the hypnotic lilt and churn of Philip Glass’s original 1992 score is missed, composer Robert A.A. Lowe creates his own eerie soundscape, its tangle of voices and electronic moans closing in around the characters with grim inexorability.
The actors move their way through this clenching mood with convincingly mounting alarm. Abdul-Matteen has the heaviest lifting to do, as Anthony begins to lose his sense of grounding in the world and learns a nightmarish truth about his childhood. He palpably embodies all that panic and transformation, the horror of history coming to bear so heavily on his present. Parris, always a welcome performer, has a more traditional path of discovery, but she fluidly plays the familiar beats.
Brianna gradually moves toward the center of the story as Candyman drives its themes home. The film is about the persistent stalking of past trauma—either personal or communal—and the ways its long, snaking tendrils infect and manipulate the mechanics of life. It’s a deeply sad, harrowing subject. But Candyman tries to wrestle some bitter, hard-won reclamation out of it, turning the legend and actual looming specter of Candyman himself—a vengeful ghost summoned by saying his name into a mirror five times—into a metaphor that can be recontextualized or repurposed, understood as something vast and innumerable rather than as a single threat. And then, maybe, pointed toward bitter righteousness.
What are we to make of the evocation of seeing “Say his name” scrawled on a wall in blood? Saying Candyman’s name brings about destruction, while the directive to cite the individual names of Black people murdered by police is, contemporarily, meant as a rallying cry of grief and defiance. The film recognizes Candyman as a totem of the fallen, placing him in a lineage of tragedy and injustice. Perhaps, then, the idea of the film is that those dead can be marshaled into a force of necessary reprisal, a Golem forged by the abuses of white society and now put in service of a new mission. The cycle of violence is not broken, it is only spun in another direction.
That’s a provocative concept, but not one that the film delivers on thoroughly enough. For all its didacticism, particularly about literal art versus the more abstractly representational kind, Candyman’s script doesn’t arrive at anything either persuasively concrete or compellingly allusive. It wants its metaphor and its reality at once, dueling approaches that give the film a sag at its center. This has a detrimental effect on the tension of the film; DaCosta doesn’t build to many big scares, either demurring at the violence or jumping into it at an awkward editing gait. The film is so busy working through what it’s trying to say that it loses its specific pacing and texture, tumbling toward a finale that subverts its own rules and confuses its argument.
It is no doubt difficult to adapt an old legacy for the here and now, to reshape its sociopolitical and psychosexual storms into the vernacular of a very alert and discursive present day. Candyman makes an admirably full-throated effort to manage that tricky task, honoring the troubled but cherished original thing (it’s great to see Vanessa Williams briefly reprising her 1992 role, to that end) while trying to add new dimension—or, rather, to more fully tease out the context that was always there. With a tighter, more incisive script, DaCosta probably could have triumphed. But her bracing images are interrupted by writing that is all too eager to explain what we’re seeing—as if it’s not already evident, staring right back at the audience, whispering volumes.
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