SCARY TALE FAILS TO HIT THE SWEET SPOT

Be afraid. Jordan Peele (Get Out) knows exactly how to rattle the skeletons in our collective closets – and Candyman shows he isn’t nearly done with us yet.

Peele takes the role of writer/producer in this “spiritual sequel” to the 1992 horror classic of the same name. Up-and-coming filmmaker Nia DaCosta (Little Woods) directs.

While Candyman doesn’t have the startling impact of Peele’s breakout film, it confirms horror as a powerful tool through which to expose Amer- ica’s racist past. Albeit one that is in danger of being blunted by overuse.

Candyman’s screenplay, written by DaCosta, Peele and regular collaborator Win Rosenfeld, is slick, savvy and perhaps a touch too self-aware.

The original film was set in Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green housing project.

Two decades on, the urban ghetto has been bulldozed to make way for swanky new hi-rise apartment blocks.

Upwardly mobile art gallery director Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parris) and her artist boyfriend Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) have just moved into one of them.

Cartwright bristles, during a housewarming dinner, when her brother’s white boyfriend challenges her on her role in the ongoing gentrification of the neighbourhood.

But it’s the ghost story her sibling (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) recounts the same night, about a slave spirit with a hook for a hand who slices the throat of anyone who summons him, that really gets under her skin.

Especially when McCoy seizes upon the urban legend as the subject for his next exhibition.

McCoy’s subsequent research leads him to an abandoned church and a handful of derelict buildings. The work he creates in a feverish burst of activity that follows is scorned by his peers, an influential critic and his supercilious art dealer.

But it generates a good deal of media attention when said dealer and his girlfriend are decapitated on opening night.

As a slasher flick, Candyman is so brutally efficient it barely elevates moviegoers’ pulses.

The lead performances are uniformly strong and there’s an immediacy to Candyman that will do nothing to hurt DaCosta’s reputation (she’s already been tapped to direct The Marvels). But it doesn’t make a lasting impression – perhaps because the ending feels so forced. IN CINEMAS NOW