Candyman (2021)
Though 2021’s Candyman won't give you nightmares, it makes up for it in unexpected ways. This sequel to the 1992 film expands on the ideas brilliantly. More than that, it makes the film topical and relevant. Stylish, inventive, and completely unpredictable, it’s so much more than a director capitalizing on a property horror fans are nostalgic for.
In the early 1990s, they say a white graduate student named Helen Lyle went on a killing spree in the Cabrini-Green projects. Others claim the real culprit was Candyman, the ghost of a lynching victim who slaughters you with his hook hand if you repeat his name five times while looking in a mirror. Inspired by the urban legend, visual artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) begins painting. When bodies start piling up, he becomes convinced Candyman is responsible.
At the beginning of the film, we hear of Sherman Fields (Michael Hargrove), a one-armed man the police accused of putting razor blades in candy. He was beaten to death years ago. Was he Candyman? He doesn’t have any bee-related motifs but everything else fits, except that he doesn’t look like Tony Todd... Is it just a coincidence? Something else? If Sherman isn’t the Candyman, what’s really going on in the Cabrini-Green projects?
The answers to that question are slowly unraveled, perhaps a bit too slowly for audiences expecting a straightforward supernatural slasher. Just wait. Everything comes together chillingly. Not in a "drops of blood falling from a gory hook" kind of way; writers Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, and Nia DaCosta (who directs) imply that the ghosts haunting this place will never go away. Maybe Blacks won’t have to fear the crack of the whip, angry mobs, biased government policies, police officers more interested in taking care of each other than dark-skinned citizens, or narrow-minded trolls on the internet tomorrow but the pain generations felt remains. It won’t be content to sit in a grave waiting to be discovered and you better pray you're not in eyesight when it emerges.
There’s A LOT to unpack in Candyman. On top of that, you also have the tale of an artist whose sanity is eroding that incorporates traditional slasher elements and body horror. Through the use of mirrors (very appropriate), the film makes you question if Anthony has gone off the deep end, if Candyman is possessing him, or if he’s the one guy that can make it all stop.
Candyman would’ve been a better film if it were more frightening and though Nia DaCosta understands that sometimes less is more, more straightforward terror would've been nice. She nonetheless proves herself a promising new face for the genre. Many scenes just make you feel so… off. It’s nothing you can easily pinpoint; it's the way the camera tracks Anthony walking down a seemingly ordinary corridor, the way the light shines on him, the color of the scene, the way the hallway turns... Something's off-kilter. The end credits are also incredible. I was too busy looking at the shadow puppet show that expands on the story we just saw even more to read ANY of the names scrolling by.
2021’s Candyman takes the original as a jumping point and expands upon it, making the mythology infinitely bigger and more fascinating. It’s bold and provocative. (Theatrical version on the big screen, August 28, 2021)
