Candyman (2021)
dir. Nia DaCosta
Rated: R
image: ©2021 Universal Pictures
The newest iteration of the Candyman franchise does everything the original film wanted to do, but better. The 1992 slasher, which Bernard Rose directed and adapted from the Clive Barker short story, The Forbidden, only grazes the surface of the racial politics it claims to be interested in. The new Candyman explores race in a much more satisfying way. Director Nia DaCosta also uses a fresh and exciting approach to build and expand upon the mythology of the world.
There’s also a question of authenticity. Barker and Rose are both white men who created a boogeyman borne out of the rotten fruit of vicious racism and hate towards Black people. I’ve never read the source material, but, besides the graphic description of the lynching that created the Candyman character – which is used for shock value and little else – Rose’s adaptation doesn’t actually care all that much about race.
There are a few passing references to gentrification in the film’s setting, the Cabrini–Green public housing section of Chicago, but otherwise the film is a straightforward, and rather uninspired, slasher movie. Its only two exceptional elements are actor Tony Todd’s hypnotic performance as Candyman, and Philip Glass’s ethereal, haunting score.
The 2021 film puts race front and center and focuses on little else. Nia DaCosta, a Black woman, and Executive Producer Jordan Peele, a Black man who set the horror film community alight with his racially confrontational 2017 film Get Out, both crafted the screenplay with the help of Peele’s regular writing partner, Win Rosenfeld. The racial hatred that poisons generations as an impetus for the story feels more authentic coming from the likes of DaCosta and Peele than Barker and Rose.
I’ll be the very first to acknowledge the thick irony of a middle-aged white man like myself having the audacity to pronounce judgement on the authenticity of who is telling Black stories. As movies are targeted to as wide an audience as possible, I have to hope that excuses me to add to the conversation, as long as I do so in as respectful and thoughtful a manner as possible.
A vociferous dissenting critical voice in the discussion surrounding the new Candyman comes via Vulture film critic Angelica Jade Bastién, a Black woman, in which she says in her review that DaCosta’s movie feels like a sellout to a white audience:
“The film can’t run from the fact that it was created with a white audience in mind, full of explanations and blunt language for things Black people already understand on a molecular level.”
I respect Bastién’s work immensely; her thoughts on film theory and practice are required reading. We stand apart in our reactions to Candyman, but she makes well-argued observations and offers incisive critiques. The film criticism community, like the filmmaking community, should seek to achieve as diverse and inclusive a set of voices as possible.
Acting as a direct sequel to the 1992 Candyman – and completely ignoring the franchise’s two other sequels – DaCosta’s new version focuses on painter and artist Anthony McCoy, played by the talented Yahya Abdul-Mateen II. Abdul-Mateen was exceptional in the HBO series Watchmen and had an incendiary turn as Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale in Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7.
Anthony is struggling professionally. He’s living with his art gallery-director girlfriend, Brianna, and he’s hit a creative wall. One night – in a direct tie to the urban legend angle of the original movie, we are told the Candyman backstory as a scary urban legend-style tale – Brianna’s brother, Troy, during a dinner in which he introduces his sister and Anthony to his new boyfriend, tells of the legend of Candyman. Or, rather, in a meta twist, Troy tells the story of Candyman through the prism of the first movie. He talks of a disturbed grad student thirty years ago, Helen Lyle (the protagonist of the first film), and how she went mad while researching the urban legend of Candyman. Lyle went on a killing spree, decapitating the dog of a Cabrini–Green resident before kidnapping the woman’s baby to offer as a sacrifice, along with Helen herself, to Candyman in an annual bonfire held in a vacant parking lot. The other residents were able to save the baby, but poor Helen, the legend goes, burned up in the fire.
Anthony is fascinated, like Helen, by the Candyman legend. Once he speaks to a local resident about the man’s own horrific past with Candyman, Anthony is alive with artistic inspiration. The resident, William, tells Anthony about a man from his youth in the 70s, Sherman Fields, who had a hook for a hand and gave out candies to the local children. A piece of candy turned up with a razor blade in it – a nod to another infamous urban legend – that harmed a white girl. The cops are on the lookout for Fields, and they descend on him in the basement laundry room of the Cabrini-Green high-rise where little William is washing his clothes. The cops summarily execute Fields as William watches.
Black trauma at the hands of white people is the narrative focus of Peele and DaCosta’s screenplay, and it goes much deeper than the original film. In fact, this new movie fixes on one of the confusing contradictions of the first Candyman. That earlier film never fully commits to the idea that Candyman is seeking vengeance upon the white people who lynched him.
We learn in the character’s mythology, told in both films, about how Candyman, whose real name was Daniel Robitaille, was a talented portraitist of wealthy whites in the late 1800s. A mob of whites brutally murdered Robitaille when he fell in love with a client’s adult daughter, of whom he had been hired to paint a portrait. The mob chopped off his hand, jammed a hook into the stump, smeared him with the honeycomb from a local bee hive, and watched as the bees slowly stung Robitaille to death.
The original Candyman has a throwaway line or two about Helen Lyle’s thesis that the Candyman legend is a way for the community to process the trauma and grief from a string of murders in the Cabrini-Green community. It never really adds up within the framework of the story, though, why Candyman is attacking his brothers and sisters, who are all treated as underclass citizens, as he was.
DaCosta’s Candyman deftly incorporates the idea of generational and cyclical trauma and how that can manifest into self-harm within communities of color. In this new movie, Candyman isn’t just one man, as William tells Anthony, “[I]t’s the whole damn swarm.” Death at the hands of white people – especially white power structures, like the police – has created a string of Candymen, and that endless cycle of trauma has been misdirected back on itself. This idea of generational trauma ties into the biggest twist of the movie, when Anthony begins to suspect there’s more than only curiosity to his obsession with the supernatural killer.
It would be enough if this rich examination of Black trauma were all there was to DaCosta’s film. But DaCosta’s style and storytelling skills are superb, making her horror movie truly frightening. The technique she uses for the flashback sequences, in which we see events from the first movie, or other scenes from the franchise’s mythology, are brilliantly conceived and executed. They are simi – possibly wholly – animated sequences featuring shadow puppets as manipulated by human hands. They are evocative of the inventive animation in the 2014 Australian horror film The Babadook, or, more magically, the stunning 1926 German silent animated fairytale The Adventures of Prince Achmed. Each of these passages are mesmerizing. (The end credits sequence, which is accompanied by more storytelling using these puppets, is magnificent.)
DaCosta and her makeup and effects teams are in top form with the body horror aspects of Candyman. Early in the film, Anthony goes to one of the famed Candyman locations to take photographs as reference for his paintings. He is stung by a bee – an immediate red flag in a horror movie in which the killer uses bees as a weapon – and the slowly creeping wound, which spreads and decays up Anthony’s arm and face, is on par with the body horror master, David Cronenberg.
The performances in Candyman are exceptional. As mentioned above, Abdul-Mateen gives a grounded, mournful performance as Anthony. Teyonah Parris, memorable as recurring character Dawn Chambers in 22 episodes of Mad Men and in Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, is emotionally devastating, especially in the later scenes, as Brianna. Parris was recently seen in Marvel’s WandaVision, and will reprise that role in The Marvels, Nia DaCosta’s upcoming entry into the MCU.
Parris’s character is dealing with intense emotional family trauma involving her father. Parris and Abdul-Mateen give their characters a strong human connection to the audience; we feel the pulverizing pressure of the racial and other traumas that they are living under. Also of note is Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Troy, and two other performances that I can’t specifically mention, one in particular because it would spoil a major plot point. (DM me after you’ve seen it, and we can discuss).
Point of Personal Privilege: The worst, and most laughable, element of Candyman is it’s clumsy, ham-handed – not to mention foolish – depiction of critics. In one scene, Anthony is showcasing his new Candyman-centric art exhibit in a showing put together by his agent.
(The agent, a white guy, is named Clive, in a presumed nod to the source material’s author. The barb about Clive’s lecherous intentions for his young interns that a drunken Anthony hurls at him, as Anthony walks out of the show after a disappointing reaction to his new work, is laugh-out-loud funny.)
During the show, Anthony initiates a discussion with, what one presumes, is an all-powerful Chicago art critic named Finley Stephens. Finley snidely informs Anthony that his new work is tired and derivative. She can barely contain her scorn as Anthony describes the impetus for his latest collection. The eyerolling that actress Rebecca Spence performs as Finley when she telegraphs her distain for Anthony’s art is too exaggerated by half.
Because critics have no morals or intellectual honesty, at least as far as the movie seems to think, Finley is singing a very different tune when Anthony’s Candyman series becomes white-hot after a few murders committed in the killer’s name. She’s anxious to do an interview with Anthony, since he’s now the talk of the town. Critics – at least the one writing this review – react and wrestle with art in an honest and open way. We love art, that’s why we’ve dedicated our lives to it. I’m sure there are a few shitty, cynical critics out there, because there are people of all stripes who are shitty and cynical.
But Candyman has a particularly strong disdain for critics. I must admit, though, that Finley provides one of the more memorable – especially because it takes place at a long distance from the camera – and chilling murders in the movie – oops, spoiler, but in my defense, you can see it coming from a mile away.
Candyman gets at some deep-seated ugly truths about systemic racism in the United States. It’s essentially a capsule overview of everything the right-wing is currently losing their minds over regarding the discipline of Critical Race Theory. Do me a favor, see it today just to irritate them. For each person who sees Candyman, a reactionary right-winger’s head metaphorically explodes. On a more positive and hopeful note, it might also lead to one more (white) person waking up to the dark legacy of our nation when it comes to racism. That’s an outcome worth supporting, even if the movie hates us poor old critics.
Why it got 4 stars:
- Candyman is effective both thematically and stylistically. I thoroughly enjoyed Nia DaCosta’s take on the material, and I’m excited to see more of her work.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- There’s a neat bit at the very beginning of the movie wherein all the production logos are flipped backwards. It’s a tie into the fact that Candyman will come to visit you if you look into a mirror and say his name five times.
- Speaking of mirrors, this movie treats the monster a little differently than the previous installments. The only way to see Candyman in this version is to be looking into a reflective surface. Sort of an anti-vampire.
- Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (AKA Lichens)’s heavily syncopated score is wonderful.
- I’m pretty sure there’s a shoutout to Jurassic Park when one panicked character says repeatedly, “Must go faster…”
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- I saw this at home via a studio screener for critics. Candyman is widely available in theaters.