What’s really spooky about Candyman is that the movie is confused in almost exactly the way that the first film was. Maybe the material itself is haunted.
Originally a short story by Clive Barker, the tale was adapted into a 1992 film by writer-director Bernard Rose. A couple of sequels followed in the 1990s before this iteration, which was written by Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, and Nia DaCosta (DaCosta directed). Although this creative team allows for the Black lens that the first film (despite its largely African-American setting) was notably missing, the movie is still bedeviled by too-muchness: too many ideas, too many backstories, too many characters, and so much metaphorical potential as to render one coherent reading almost impossible.
The story proper returns to Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood in the present day. What was once the site of a notorious public-housing project is now gentrified (as is the case in real life). Indeed, art-gallery director Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris) lives—along with her painter boyfriend Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II)—in an upscale condo building that was originally designed for low-income residents. Anthony is in an artistic rut, so he wanders the neighborhood one day and encounters an old-timer (Colman Domingo) who shares first-hand details of the Candyman legend. The story of an innocent, hook-armed denizen of Cabrini who was murdered by police and came back as a spirit of indiscriminate violence, Candyman inspires Anthony, who begins painting his image.
Already you can sense the levels of potential meaning, including the notion of artistic exploitation. When two people are murdered in front of one of Anthony’s Candyman exhibitions and he embraces the attention it brings to his art, is he gentrifying the horror? In the real world, when does a portrait of George Floyd, say, cross over from activism to appropriation? (Could this also be asked of the movie’s own tagline—“Say his name”—which purposefully references what has been chanted in memory of another Black American killed by police, Breonna Taylor?) Unfortunately, Candyman isn’t content to examine such loaded implications. Instead, it spirals out to also become an art-world satire (A Bucket of Blood is a likely touchstone); an exploration of personal trauma, via an underserved subplot involving Parris’ character; and social commentary on police violence. All while awkwardly trying to incorporate and connect to the plot of the 1992 film, which was itself overly complicated.
And yet, there is a style to this Candyman that kept me enthralled—not so much in the horror set pieces, but in the details and even in how the film moves. The first thing you notice, before the movie proper even begins, is that the studio logo has been inverted, as if in a mirror. (A reference to one notorious bit of the Candyman legend: that he can be summoned if you look in a mirror and say his name five times.) Shortly after that, DaCosta delivers a series of eerie tracking shots looking up at the Chicago sky, traveling backwards between the skyscrapers (this is itself an inverse of the 1992 film’s recurring helicopter shots, which traced the city’s expressways from above). Throughout, DaCosta makes interesting use of Chicago’s distinct locations, including a sequence set at Marina City towers. We get both an unsettling Steadicam shot down the oddly curved interior hallways and a sinister exterior shot that slowly pulls away from the buildings, revealing their honeycombed pattern (a reference to another part of the Candyman legend: bees).
In addition, the movie employs a mesmerizingly minimalistic shadow-puppet motif, designed and performed by Chicago’s Manual Cinema. This is first seen in an opening flashback, as something Domingo’s character did as a boy, then later used on different occasions to “act out” other portions of the Candyman narrative. (A gorgeous short-film version accompanies the end credits.) The technique is appropriate for a movie that’s not only a ghost story, of sorts, but also about how ghost stories are told, and what that chosen medium—be it a puppet show, painting, or police report—can do to the message. Maybe Candyman knows what it’s doing after all.
