Candyman, review: highbrow slasher sequel that takes a stab at the art world
15 cert, 91 min. Dir: Nia DaCosta
Ultra-stylish and socially aware, the 1992 Candyman has a credible claim to be the best US horror film of that decade. Bernard Rose’s chiller was only a modest box office success, but accumulated word of mouth as one of the most avidly rented video titles of its day, having relocated Clive Barker’s London-set short story “The Forbidden” with iconic power to Chicago.
Superbly acted, too, by Virginia Madsen and Tony Todd, and set to Philip Glass’s finest score, it was elegantly constructed around a strong hook. I don’t mean the one wedged in the bloody stump of Todd’s right arm, but, rather, the premise that saying the name “Candyman” five times in a mirror invoked this black spectre from America’s grievous racial history to appear out of thin air and rip you apart.
The new film taking Candyman’s name, co-written and -produced by Jordan (Get Out) Peele and directed with promising pizzazz by Nia DaCosta, takes us back to the neighbourhood where it all began – the old site of Chicago’s Cabrini-Green housing project on the Near North Side, now ripped down and comprehensively gentrified. In real life, the folklore surrounding the notoriously crime-ridden Cabrini-Green has filled books of social history, inescapably bolstered by the earlier film’s legacy.
Until it falters at the climax, this is a sleekly disorientating sequel which reframes the whole premise from a strictly African-American point of view. No one here remembers Madsen’s white academic Helen Lyle as a heroine any more, but instead as a reviled child abductor and dog killer; the myth of “Candyman”, meanwhile, has coalesced around a victim of police injustice called Sherman Fields (Michael Hargrove), a one-armed man slaughtered after being accused of planting razorblades in sweets.
The character who becomes obsessed, as Helen was, with retracing the steps of Candyman’s notoriety is Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a painter going through a slump in a Cabrini-Green condo conversion with his more ambitious gallerist girlfriend (a terrific Teyonah Parris). Fatefully, he decides to research Fields’s killing as the basis of a new artwork.
All this film’s sharpest moments take on the art world, where Anthony’s enemies fall foul of the mirror incantation and suffer outré fates at hook-point. Wickedly, the more attached his name becomes to these grisly murders, the higher his stock rises.
This is highbrow, PhD-thesis horror. Peele and DaCosta are clearly using Anthony to explore their own status as artists, in a white consumer culture that professes boredom with certain themes and needs them to push, provoke, shock at all times. One seen-it-all critic (a withering Rebecca Spence) rolls her eyes at the way Anthony’s work tritely addresses gentrification, only to take him way more seriously when he’s up to his neck, and a possible culprit, in serial killings.
DaCosta shows serious verve with the set-pieces, especially an avant-garde summoning at a private view, and a ladies’ room massacre with four bitchy students testing out the mirror game. It’s very Peele to weigh that say-his-name conceit against the naming-the-dead protocols of the Black Lives Matter movement, making the film hum with edgy currency amid its hack-and-slash gambits.
It’s with steep disappointment, then, that we tumble into the last reel – a broken, re-edited-feeling wrap-up that’s confused and frankly confusing. Some characters drop off the map while others make hammy, lurching assaults on story logic. Keeping track of Candyman, who’s played by at least three actors, becomes the wrong kind of nightmare.
It’s partly the script’s point that he’s a phantasmagorical bogeyman who absorbs various identities, but the film gets less scary, not more, by randomising his impact. Perhaps it’s just Rose’s extraordinary ending coming back to haunt this one, which stunts the achievement DaCosta mostly got on screen: a slicing satire on who gets to call whom a villain.
