CANDYMAN Review
From the beginning, the CANDYMAN series has always been about the power of legends and myths and the ways in which they shape us and how we (unknowingly or not) shape them. Initially finding life as the creation of acclaimed writer Clive Barker in his short story entitled THE FORBIDDEN, CANDYMAN was eventually crafted into a horror-thriller film helmed by writer/director Bernard Rose in 1992, where the elements of myths converged with America’s brutal and bloody racial history. The vengeful ghost of an 1800’s-era black painter wrongfully accused of a crime and subsequently brutally murdered by a bloodthirsty crowd of white people, Candyman (played with an impeccable aura of timeless menace by Tony Todd) haunted the characters within the film and the wider popular culture outside of the frame. With just one film, the specter of Candyman became its own sort of myth, one that could frighten children who weren’t even old enough to see the actual movie itself(such as myself). Even so, Rose’s CANDYMAN, while an effective thriller, never quite delved into the ideas and themes it presented of persecuted and brutalized black men coming back to life to terrorize future generations of white and black people alike.
This new iteration of CANDYMAN, this time helmed by director Nia DaCosta (who shares co-writing credits with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld), aims to tackle those ideas head on. Cabrini Green, the real life projects of Chicago that loomed large in the 70’s-90’s before being torn down to make way for higher priced apartments and coffee shops, once more acts as the film’s center; a location where real world oppression and violence led to campfire tales of boogeymen who hide in walls and offer candy spiked with razors to children. Throughout its almost too brisk 90 minute runtime, DaCosta and her crew not only continue to look at the power passed down tales can hold over a community but the real-life traumas that breathe all too real life into them. In the midst of it all resides Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a struggling painter looking to make a break into the art world his partner, Brianna (Teyonah Parris), easily inhabits. While his current work — which tackles themes of racial violence and its victims — is deemed “important”, the primarily white gatekeepers of the art world still crave something more than the trauma that Anthony puts out onto his canvases. This leads him to discover the tale of the Candyman, who (as Colman Domingo’s ex-Cabrini Green resident tells it) is the ghost of a black man wrongfully accused in the 70’s of lacing candy with razorblades who was then beaten to death by police. As the legend goes, the Candyman is summoned by simply saying his name five times in a mirror, which, this still being a horror movie, Anthony does jokingly before learning brutally that some legends are much closer to the truth than we think.
As the bodies pile up, so too does Anthony’s growing obsession with the peripheral ghost emerge, as something much deeper and historic begins to connect Anthony and Black America as a whole into the all too real myth of Candyman. As its own piece, CANDYMAN is about as slick as a horror movie can be made nowadays as DaCosta, with ease, plays with imagery in a way that is fun and occasionally hair-raising, putting her violent specter near the frames or, of course, in the reflective surfaces throughout the movie. From the opening credits montage that floats through an upside down Chicago backed Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s increasingly oppressive score, CANDYMAN reveals itself to be a wonderfully produced movie with John Guleserian’s cinematography creating a few indelible images that bring DaCosta’s increasingly isolated and ghostly world to life. While not the scariest film (Rose’s film does a tad better job of creating actual suspense in the Candyman’s elusive appearances and presence), the visual eye DaCosta holds is impressive with a particular focus on the color yellow standing out in the film’s sets and character costumes, exemplified with the ghostly Candyman himself, here in this film a much more brutalized image of a black man’s beaten face shrouded by a yellow as the sun winter coat, brutal hook hand in tow. In DaCosta’s entry, the violence faced and experienced by black Americans isn’t just some malevolent event you idly pass by as its printed on a newspaper, it’s personified in the shape of a bloodied and brutal spirit.
While the film’s story takes a bit to get going — taking slight, if interesting, stabs at the aforementioned world of art and various character’s backgrounds (namely Parris’ underdeveloped backstory) — the further the film moves along the more DaCosta and her co-writers involve Rose’s film in interesting ways that build and evolve on the first film’s themes and narrative, particularly the haunting idea of generations of trauma (and their accompanying spirits) violently passing down from one generation to the next. Where the film ends up is a tad silly (and metaphorically unsubtle) in the overall seriousness of the film but it nonetheless makes for an impressive evolution of the Candyman mythos and in a way, weaponizes the character himself to become not an enemy of its black characters but something closer to a kind of avenging angel. Being the center of the film and of the Candyman’s own interest, Abdul-Mateen II’s performance is fine enough but it can’t quite overcome the fact that Anthony is ultimately a narrative mover who only gets interesting the more the ties emerge between himself and the Candyman history. Indeed, most of the other characters in the film are well acted but overall remain rather one-note such as the case for Parris as the worrying partner to Anthony and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as the film’s at times distracting comedic voice. It’s Colman Domingo and Michael Hargrove though, the former playing the ex-Cabrini Green resident full of myths and traumas of his own and the latter chillingly portraying the wronged spirit of an innocent man, who leave a lasting impression throughout DaCosta’s film.
In its final moments (making eye-catching use of shadow puppets to further connect the ghostly spirits of Candyman to that of America’s brutal history towards Black Americans), Nia DaCosta’s CANDYMAN aims to place itself as something more than a remake/sequel to a popular 90’s horror flick. Whether due to its compact runtime or a script that can’t quite handle dealing with multiple topics, DaCosta’s film can’t quite reach its sky high aspirations but like the myths it concerns itself with, CANDYMAN at the very least makes for one hell of ghost tale, albeit one with a little more real world relevancy to chew on.
4/5
