“Candyman,” Reviewed: A Sequel That Cuts Far Deeper Than the Original

The new “Candyman” is as much a sequel as a reboot. Like the original film, from 1992, it’s set in Chicago and centered on the site of the Cabrini-Green housing project, which was seen in the earlier film as a gang-infested hive of horror but is now depicted in its current form, largely demolished and replaced with new, gentrified housing. Based on the same premise of an urban legend, founded in that housing project, of a killer called Candyman who is invoked by saying his name into a mirror five times—and involving several of the same key characters, the new movie plants a firm new foundation beneath that tale. The sequel is the story of an artist whose work is, above all, an exploration of his community and its collective memory, and who uncovers, through his art, a story that consumes and destroys him. This narrative, which also involves the politics of race and class and the historical themes on which the original story depends, makes the new film—directed by Nia DaCosta, who co-wrote the script with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld—far more probing, engaging, and challenging than the original film. So, for that matter, do the elements of style with which DaCosta realizes it, ones that both mesh with the story and add piquant points of mystery.

The movie is centered on a prosperous thirtysomething Black couple, Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris), who live in a duplex apartment on the former grounds of Cabrini-Green, on the city’s North Side. Anthony, who in the original film was an infant (and a victim of Candyman), is now an artist with a studio in the apartment’s upstairs space. Brianna, a curator, works for Clive (Brian King), an art dealer whose gallery shows Anthony’s art. Yet Anthony, at the start of the movie, is at something of an impasse: he’s been invited to exhibit in Clive’s forthcoming group show yet has no new work to offer. Then Brianna’s brother Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), who comes over for dinner with his partner, Grady (Kyle Kaminsky), tells the story of the Candyman legend and the white female social scientist who’d reported on it—in effect, he tells the story of the 1992 movie—and it inspires Anthony to create a piece about the character.

The new film begins with a fresh backstory—a preface, set in 1977, in the same housing project, where another man, Sherman Fields (played by Michael Hargrove), is thought to be terrorizing neighborhood children with candy into which he’d slipped razor blades. When a kid named William is sent by his mother to the basement laundry room, Sherman—a tall and hefty man with a hook in the place of one hand—emerges from a hole in the wall of the dilapidated and neglected facility and offers William candy. Sherman turns out to be innocent of the charge—but the police hunt him down and kill him nonetheless, and this murder, not Helen’s sociological positing of gang violence, turns out to be the source of the legend.

That’s what Anthony learns when he heads to the ruins of Cabrini-Green and chances to meet the adult William (played with great poignancy and authority by Colman Domingo), who unburdens himself of his eyewitness account of the attack on Sherman—of the “true face of fear” at the sound of the police. Yet in the course of their recurring encounters, William—in effect, a hidden prophet—delivers a hieratic word to Anthony about the Candyman tale, one that links up again with the 1992 film.

That earlier movie establishes a primordial source of the myth: a nineteenth-century Black artist named Daniel Robitaille, who had an affair with a white woman after being hired to paint her portrait. Her father hired goons to torture and kill him. In the 1992 film, he returns as Candyman, whereas in the new film William expands and clarifies the myth: far from identifying Candyman with Robitaille or, for that matter, with Sherman, he reveals that these men are only two in a litany of Black victims of police brutality and racist vigilantism—and that Candyman stands for them all. Far from a means of coping with the random violence of Cabrini-Green residents against one another, the Candyman tale is the story of widespread, wrongful, wanton violence against Black people. The ongoing, unredeemed sum of these untold victims’ agony culminates in the myth—and, more important, in the reality that the myth represents—and Anthony, armed with this knowledge, expands his art with an obsessional fervor ranging far beyond the myth’s local specifics.

I’m always wary of spoiling endings, but with the new “Candyman” I’m leery of even disclosing elements of the setup, which offers its own surprises. When it’s time for Clive’s group show (which, by the way, is titled “A Fickle Sonance,” the name of a 1961 album by the great saxophonist Jackie McLean), Anthony submits a piece of interactive work, based on the Candyman story, that he titled “Say My Name,” a sharp double reference to the summoning of the killer and to the #SayHerName campaign calling attention to female victims of police violence. Unsurprisingly, the project is both misunderstood and derided by a prominent white art critic (Rebecca Spence) who attends the show—though when the work becomes unexpectedly famous for its real-life power to shed real blood, she reconsiders. (Anthony gets a measure of revenge nonetheless.) In his newfound fame, he also finds himself yielding to the temptations of artistic vanity and demagogy.

As in the earlier film, Candyman gets his prime traits—his prosthetic hook and his ambient swarm of bees—from Robitaille, whose assailants are said to have chopped off his hand and smeared him with honey so that he’d be stung to death. (Both characters are again played by Tony Todd.) In the new film, as Anthony’s work gravitates to the legend and the figure of Candyman, he is shocked to find himself bearing other affinities with Robitaille, and so, with the killer, too. (The theme gives rise to some of the film’s goriest details of body horror.) Meanwhile, Anthony also uncovers a family secret—a calculated silence that, as in a Greek tragedy, has led him through life on a blind course of self-ignorance and that, when he gets too close to it, wreaks havoc on him. The symbolic elements of this new “Candyman” have a raw and furious power—the anguished bearing of witness and the burden of unbearable, unspeakable knowledge, and the silencing of it by the oppressive indifference of (white) society at large. The spirit of revenge and its high moral price; the danger of artistic expression veering heedlessly into reckless self-absorption; the inescapable tension between personal relationships and blind artistic drive: DaCosta realizes these themes with a fine filigree of inflected details, both in her cinematic compositions and in the performances she elicits.

At certain moments the actors pierce the texture of the movie with their own mnemonic power, as when Anthony, nosing around the ruins of Cabrini-Green, hears a police siren and jumps back to hide behind a wall, or when Brianna has a warm yet curious encounter, in the wake of Anthony’s sudden public prominence, with another Black curator, Danielle Harrington (Christiana Clark), or in the steadfast, anguished presence of Anthony’s mother, Anne-Marie (played, as in the 1992 film, by Vanessa Williams). The movie is at its strongest when DaCosta unleashes images of angular, rhythmic force, the most distinctive of which are inspired by scenes involving the movie’s primary visual metaphor, mirrors. In one scene, the famed comedic gesture of “Duck Soup”—two characters facing each other in a mirror, their gestures perfectly imitative—becomes a haunted, uncanny extravaganza. In another scene, of a high-risk confrontation, Brianna discovers the extraordinary practical implications of the legend’s monstrous power—and of her ability to control it.

Yet for all its symbolic heft and keen-eyed flair, there’s a scattershot quality to “Candyman” that has to do with the seemingly inescapable demands of its genre source. The horror-film combination of constrained tautness and calculated gore keeps some of the themes from fully developing and leaves narrative loose ends dangling. A movie about an artist inevitably reflects back on the artists who made it; in the new “Candyman,” the effect is doubled by the presence of two artists in the story, and doubled again by the central significance of mirrors. But DaCosta’s sharp-edged and inventive direction doesn’t cut loose with the furious subjectivity and specificity that her mighty subjects demand. Even the film’s extreme subjective touches come off as somewhat abstract and impersonal. Its self-questioning of the demands and the dangers of artistic politics doesn’t quite bend the mirror all the way back to see behind the camera. Nonetheless, the film’s teeming speculative imagination, finely stylized detail, and hectic sense of urgency suggest the unbearably distant resolutions to the ongoing crises of racial politics in America and the destructive pressures that they inflict, including on the artistic conscience. It’s a work of vigorous, furious pessimism.

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