Reboot you weren’t expecting is awake to our moment now
While the trailer suggests the reboot Universal Studios wishes this one were, instead of the one it is, co-writer and director Nia Dacosta has made her own kind of “Candyman” — sleek, brooding, methodical, thoughtful.
Gorehounds looking for even more splurch than the first “Candyman” delivered back in 1992 will have to wait for something else. A generation ago, that film relocated author Clive Barker’s bee-infested spirit of vengeance, born in his 1985 short story
“The Forbidden,” from the grim council houses of Liverpool, England, to the notorious Cabrini-green high-rises of Chicago.
It was a crafty, wellacted, complicatedly racist success, told from the perspective of mostly white academics out for themselves. Tony Todd’s embodiment of the title character meant actual, forceful
Black representation in a genre generally more concerned with killing off Black people, where you could find them, as quickly as possible. Still, the racial dynamics were just queasy enough to make “Candyman” an uneasy sort of hit.
The new “Candyman” has a few things in common with the first one. It too is crafty and well-acted. But the racial lens is new.
The cumulative sense of anger and despair, working from a script invested in cycles of urban segregation and “renewal” that play directly into the white power structure, sets a different tone. Dacosta, whose impressive previous feature was the sharp-witted neo-western “Little Woods,” waits a full half-hour to fully reveal the hook-handed spirit of vengeance, and to kill off her first victim in a sequence of nocturnal performance art.
The main characters are artists and curators looking for advancement. Struggling painter Anthony (Yahya Abdul-mateen II) lives with gallery curator Brianna (Teyonah Parris).
Only after the first unexplained murder in the gallery does the artist at the center of the new “Candyman” find his muse.
Anthony pours himself into his work, creating in a fugue state a grisly exhibition he calls “Say My Name.” This refers to the say-it-five-times-and-die Candyman mythology. The movie begins with a 1977 prologue before taking things into 2019. She and cinematographer John Guleserian favor slow zooms, straight out of the 1970s, and an eerie mastery of filming familiar Chicago landmarks in fresh ways.
Initiated and co-written by Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfield,whose script was retooled by Dacosta, the new “Candyman” is as much a clinical study of strivers and weasels in the contemporary art scene as it is a horror reboot. Parris’ curator character, haunted by her own childhood history, never quite emerges in the writing. Colman Domingo, terrific as always — the entire cast excels — shoulders the burden of some rather stilted third-act developments.
A couple of key players from the ’92 original return here, namely Todd and Vanessa Williams, the young mother whose baby … well, spoiler there. To each era its own “Candyman.” Many will find Dacosta’s take on the story didactic, I suppose, or low on genre payoffs. I’m eager to see it a second time, flaws and all. It’s alive and awake to where we are now.
MPAA rating: R (for bloody horror violence and language including some sexual references)
Running time: 1:31
How to watch: Now in theaters.