Names have incredible power and the name Candyman has terrified and captivated audience since the 90s. Now, a new entry in his story has arrived with the Nia DaCosta directed, Jordan Peele produced sequel, with some updated racial politics and a new desire to thrill and scare audiences.
Candyman begins in the 70s, chronicling the murder of a man named Sherman Fields by racist police officers in Cabrini Green. We then move forward to the present, where Anthony (Yahya Abdul Mateen) and his art gallery director girlfriend Brianna (Teyonah Parris) now live in a gentrified Cabrini Green. After being told the story of Helen Lyles by Brianna’s brother and a chance encounter with William Burke, a Cabrini Green resident, he becomes obsessed with legend. But legends never die and the characters all find out how much truth there is to the rumors.
The first film in this franchise is fresh on my mind having seen it the day before watching the sequel and it is clear why this new movie was made. That film has taken on a life of its own and there was clearly room to update the story for a new audience. I appreciate the way the film addresses one of the biggest critiques of the original (a Black man who was killed by white people kills a bunch of Black people?) and truly centered the Black characters/ experience; but there were several factors that kept me from embracing the film fully.
Nia DaCosta definitely has a sense of style and finds ways to be inventive with the characters and the violence. She also directs Yahya and Teyonah to some solid performances and gets Colman Domingo in his great firecracker mode. What she didn’t do in this case is fill in the voids of the story and the script leaves plenty.
Candyman, within the context of the film, is both a person and an idea. He’s an urban legend akin to Bloody Mary, a shorthand for Black trauma, and a tangible threat to the characters and city of Chicago. That is an awful lot to rest on a character and much like the original, his impact on the audience is minimized. He’s just a floating idea that kills people and scares them in the narrative, but there was never any moment that he was terrifying to us, the viewers. Candyman is too many things to everyone in the story and only a couple of those things are dramatically interesting.
Candyman is therefore rendered as more of an avatar of ideas than he is a horror villain, which is challenging when you need to terrify the characters and community. To do that, you’d need to put the characters in a vise and squeeze them, and while Anthony goes through a lot in this movie, it doesn’t quite feel grounded. For a movie that talks about Black trauma, it’s wild to never have this character dealing with the police or press in any way, especially give his proximity and link to two murders. The film isn’t quite interested in getting beats like that right because there’s more ideas to explore and it’s to our detriment. By the time Candyman reaches its conclusion, it’s still throwing concepts at you but without interesting narrative beats to make those worthwhile.
The movie wears its ideas and themes like coat and waves around like a hook when it needs to. DaCosta’s grounding of the story in the present and establishing connective tissue of trauma that the Black community experiences is an inspired bit of thought. The movie vibrates at its highest frequency when its indulging those very specific moments and conversations. However, as a whole, these ideas don’t cohere into an even, interesting picture, leaving Candyman feeling like a liquid amorphous thing rather than a solid entity. The ninety minute run time is a blessing in the era of too long horror, but this movie feels slight because nothing lands in a solid way.