Review: Candyman (2021)

It’s sometimes hard to reconcile your admiration for a film with the reservations you may have with key aspects of its artistic vision. Such is the case with Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, a legacy sequel and diegetic reboot to the 1992 original horror film from Bernard Rose. My feelings for the film manifest as an embattled affection; I love the film’s visual style, music, and tone, but am annoyed that the film cannot pair these specific elements with a satisfying finish or cohesive thematic approach.

The new Candyman is gorgeous and bold, with a stunning musical score and clear intent behind its tense sequences of violence and terror. It’s inventive and occasionally scary, satisfying some of the prerequisites for a successful horror film. But like so many horror films, and particularly modern “prestige horror” films, its narrative conclusion and overreliance on metaphor undoes much of the strength of its filmmaking, producing an admirable, but unsatisfying whole.

There is much to like about DaCosta’s film, which picks up 30 years after the original and follows painter, Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who becomes obsessed with the legend of the Candyman as he works on a new visual art project. The film modernizes and streamlines some of the obsessions of Rose’s original film—sometimes to invigorating but occasionally deflating effect. 

For example, the new Candyman is gorgeous. DaCosta and cinematographer John Guleserian shoot the film in stark, wide frames with an emphasis on deep focus and centre framing. The result isolates characters, making them more vulnerable within the frame, and emphasizes architecture and geography, which plays into the narrative and thematic focus on gentrification and ghettoization, specifically in the projects of Chicago. 

In the film, Anthony and his girlfriend, Brianna (Teyonah Parris), who is a gallerist, live in a sanitized and opulent new condo built on the former projects of Cabrini-Green. As Anthony learns about the Candyman legend and investigates the remaining row houses and last remnants of the projects, he awakens supernatural forces, which target those individuals in the area that profited from the gentrification and whitewashing of its tortured history. Thus, the visual approach depicts the upscale, gentrified Near North Side of Chicago as something akin to a home built on a graveyard—fraudulent, superficial, and haunted by the ghosts of what came before.

The musical score is even more astounding than the cinematography. Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe builds off of Philip Glass’s score from the original film, using choral chants, discordant string and synthesizer pieces, and cycling musical progressions to create an anxious and frenzied atmosphere. The opening credits—which invert the bird’s eye view of the original film’s opening credits and depict key architectural landmarks in Chicago from underneath, framing them as upside-down pillars disappearing into the mists of the sky as if the sky is an ocean of fog—has Lowe’s haunting score play at blaring volume, setting the stage for a truly unsettling 90 minutes.

But the film only capitalizes on a portion of that initial promise. Anthony’s preliminary investigation and obsession with the Candyman legend is compelling. We watch him skulk around the abandoned row houses of Cabrini-Green and strike up a friendship with Burke (Colman Domingo), a laundromat owner who used to live in the projects and whose childhood we see in flashback in the opening sequence. 

As Anthony, Abdul-Mateen II channels a kind of upwardly-mobile ennui in his performance: boredom with his economic success yet artistic stagnation leads him to grow callous in his relationships and reckless in his investigation. By the time reality starts to shift on Anthony, Abdul-Mateen II is up to the challenge of performing the late night frenzies and existential panic. But he also lets us glimpse a bit of his exhilaration at finally awakening from his boredom. It adds an intriguing ambiguity to the character, where you wonder if this is what he wanted all along—to feel alive and have the world know his name, damn the consequences.

The film also capitalizes on interesting parallels with the original film. Anthony’s investigation into the Candyman legend mirrors Helen Lyle’s own investigation in the original, but shifts the moral implication of his findings to the art world instead of the academic; in the original, Helen is an academic studying the sociopolitical effects of urban legends, while in this follow-up, Anthony is a painter trying to invigorate his own artistic output by mining the sociopolitical consequences of real world suffering and terror. The new film even finds an interesting way to explore the past and the real-world legacy surrounding the Candyman legend, using creepy shadow puppets to recount the events of the original film as well as other legends passed on by the characters. It weds the visual presentation with the central thematic interest. 

In both films, the result of the protagonist’s preliminary investigation is that they come to believe the legendary evil they’ve uncovered is a manifestation of the evils of systemic racism, police oppression, and displacement due to gentrification. The problem is, DaCosta and her co-writers, Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, seem to agree with the characters in a way that the original film does not. In my review of the original film, I outlined my issue with the literalization of metaphors and allegorical creep in modern horror films, which make their central terrors a one-to-one manifestation of some social ill, like racism or trauma. The new Candyman doesn’t go all-in on an allegorical reading—it’s too incoherent in its final moments to clarify any such reading—but it does lean into Jordan Peele’s penchant for using horror as a strong and defined metaphor for social issues, which dulls the subconscious terror of much of the imagery. It makes me doubt the film will have the same effect on viewers in 30 years time as the original Candyman does today.

As well, the film wanders into the realm of satire, perhaps accidentally, in its depiction of the visual art world, drawing unfavourable comparisons to Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw, a film I like a fair deal, but one which is more consistently broad and even goofy in its tone than this one. Suffice to say, I don’t think Candyman is deliberately going for broad caricatures in its art world scenes, but it does conjure a (perhaps deliberate) homage to the laughably unfavourable depiction of an art critic found in Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman, mocking the condescension of critics and their scorn for horror, in particular.

It’s almost funny, though, that the detours into art world satire and overly literal readings of its metaphors are forgotten in the final moments of the film simply because it whiffs the landing. To be fair, many horror movies have forgettable endings. Even some great horror films, like 28 Days Later…, are not satisfying in their final moments. However, the ending to Candyman shows that the issues with the film lie not with individual performers or craftspeople or its visual conception or tone, but with the writers, who couldn’t wrestle their intriguing idea into a comprehensible yet potent whole. The confusing ending of Candyman hardly takes away from the great score or the intriguing visual approach, but for a film with such ambitions, it’s disappointing that it ends up as just another fun yet messy horror film, with an execution that can’t match its high concept.

6 out of 10

Candyman (2021, USA)

Directed by Nia DaCosta; written by Jordan Peele & Win Rosenfeld and Nia DaCosta; starring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Colman Domingo, Kyle Kaminsky, Vanessa Williams, Rebecca Spence, Michael Hargrove, Brian King.

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