Mark Reviews Movies: CANDYMAN (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 26, 2021

The Candyman of co-writer/director Nia DaCosta's Candyman, a direct sequel to the 1992 film of the same name, isn't the same spirit as the one from the original, and also, he is that same supernatural presence. If the first film almost accidentally found some depth about the pervasive nature and longevity of racial injustice, DaCosta's movie brings that film's intentional subtext or chance insight front and center in her follow-up.

The 1992 film was an assured and eerie piece of horror that kind of stumbled upon a deeper message, in turning its malevolent spirit into a victim of racial violence, whose presence in the housing projects of Chicago reflected the ongoing prejudice represented by those projects. DaCosta, along with fellow screenwriters Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, want the message to be the point in this sequel. It has a lot to say about violence, injustice, art as a method of either addressing or exploiting such things, and the idea of legacy on multiple levels. In trying to say so much, the movie comes up short in examining those ideas, while stumbling in actually telling this story.

This new tale returns to a modern-day Cabrini-Green (wisely ignoring the two sequels that followed the first film), after a prologue reminds us of the way things were. In 1977, a young boy, doing some laundry in one of the tower apartment buildings of the neighborhood, encounters a man with a hook. This Candyman's fate is a continuance of the urban legend's cycle and a societal one.

In the present day, we meet Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), an artist, and his girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris), an art gallery curator, who live in the currently gentrified neighborhood of Cabrini-Green. As Brianna's brother Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) sums it up, the city erected the structures and zoned the boundaries of a ghetto, only to tear it down once they realized they actually had created one.

That's one legacy here—of such social injustice torn down and forgotten, as people are displaced so that the neighborhood can eventually flourish with new residents. Another is how the story of a white graduate student, who came to Cabrini-Green researching the urban legend of the Candyman, has become an urban legend herself (DaCosta uses some striking sequences of shadow puppetry for the telling of these fearful myths and even more horrific histories).

Further pieces of legacy come from the stories and existence of William (Colman Domingo), the owner of a laundromat, who was the boy from the prologue and now haunts the abandoned rows of apartments from the old housing projects. He's the one who tells Anthony, fascinated and inspired to create by the legend of the grad student, about how the police killed the Candyman he met, only for everyone to discover he was innocent of any crime later. That's the horrifying core of this movie's interpretation of the myth: The Candyman isn't just one person but a whole "hive" of tragedy, pain, and trauma.

The original urban legend remains the same. Say his name five times in the mirror, and the Candyman will appear in the reflection and kill the one who summoned him. Anthony jokes with Brianna about playing the mirror game—until he actually does it himself.

At this point, the movie falls into a somewhat familiar pattern, as Anthony continues his search for information about the Candyman—his mind fixated on painting images of the legend's various incarnations, while his body deteriorates from a bee sting that spreads up to his face in a kind of rot. Several killings occur, as others, inspired by an art piece Anthony created, begin to summon the Candyman in the mirror.

Early on, DaCosta forces us to observe reflections, figures hiding in the corners of spaces, and shadows that are soon to change from the presence of a figure. Those sequences of suspense and bloody horror use the same techniques, especially in how we can only see the Candyman through reflective surfaces (This leads to some clever scenes involving an invisible presence tearing at material and flesh—not to mention one scene in an elevator walled entirely in mirrors). The filmmaker often allows only a glimpse of the Candyman peering around a corner and obscures actual violence by way of perspective (The blood flows in a waterfall from the view underneath some toilet stalls, and one killing is observed through a high-rise window at an increasing distance).

The results are creepy and, at times, startling, but then, there's the story itself, which loses its way in half-considered ideas and characters. Anthony has a past that connects him directly to the events of the first film, but by the time that and its potential ramifications are revealed, the character already has become an empty shell of obsession. Brianna has her own painful history, and if there's any significance to this or her character in general, it has been ignored by the screenwriters or left on the cutting room floor.

Indeed, so many of the movie's ideas are more or less abandoned, as the plot settles into a rhythm of routine and, especially, in its jarring rush toward a climax. Candyman offers some thoughtful awareness of what its eponymous entity represents (and, at the end, a cunning subversion in what he could mean in the future), but in too many other ways, the movie comes up short.

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