Candyman

Review

Candyman (2021) is the direct sequel to the 1992 masterpiece which is also titled Candyman. Personally, Candyman (1992) is my second favorite film ever, I think it is a gorgeous film with a very poignant message which ends up being a very effective psychological slasher. Overall, I think Candyman (2021) is a worthy successor even if it’s not the greatest movie ever. This movie has a lot of mechanical issues but in terms of aesthetics and the messaging behind the movie it’s very powerful and emotional.

This movie is about Anthony McCoy who is a black artist in Chicago who hasn’t made art in 2 years and needs to find a new place to draw inspiration from. After being told that his past in the South Side is “kinda played”, he reflects on a story that his girlfriend’s brother told him about a tragedy that occurred in nearby Cabrini Green and ends up deciding to paint based on that tragedy. His paintings don’t go over well during the showing but after the curator and his intern are killed in front of it, people are suddenly so much more interested in his art. Anthony begins loosing his mind in his obsession with Candyman and then with the eventual realization that Candyman is real. Anthony finally finds out that he is the baby who was kidnapped by Candyman and he returns to Cabrini Green for the finale of the film. William Burke, who has been the story-teller throughout the film, decides to turn Anthony into a new version of Candyman. Anthony’s girlfriend, Bri, ends up killing Burke but while she’s comforting Anthony, the police arrive and shoot him on sight. While she’s in the cop car being told to cover for the police’s actions she invokes Candyman’s name and summons Anthony who kills the whole swarm and the movie ends with Candyman, now in the form of Daniel Robitaille, instructing her to “Tell Everyone”.

I really love a lot of the visuals throughout the film, as I was watching, the category that I had the most thoughts about was the ‘Visuals that Stuck Out” category. I would have to say that my favorite visual in the film is when Sherman Fields comes out of the wall at the beginning. The visual is so creepy and effective and the layers that it has when you realize this creepy imagery is what got an innocent man killed and that in that scenario you would have gotten him killed too because you were scared too. The layers within that is just so impactful and so uncomfortable to watch.

A lot of this movie is shot very gorgeously. Moments like when the art critic gets killed are very impactful visually especially considering the visual reference to Anthony’s painting. The shots of Chicago flipped upside down are so very pretty and I think Nia DaCosta just has an amazing eye and it almost makes me want to watch ‘The Marvels’ to see what she’ll do with it.

I think the new score for this film is absolutely amazing. It has a very droning quality to it and it very much helps highlight the fact that this movie is going to be very different in both story and tone from the original. The droning of the score really reminds me of the buzzing of bees and overall is just very unsettling to hear.

The gore throughout the movie is done very well and Anthony’s arm is only second to fucking Hostel which is insane considering the first movie wasn’t super heavy on the gore. Every time his arm would appear on screen I would always look away because it just made my fucking stomach turn.

And it wouldn’t be a complete review if I didn’t bring up the very poignant themes throughout this movie. As I experienced it, the most important theme present in this movie is the importance of storytelling and how forgetting the past will cause us to repeat it. Throughout the movie there are multiple instances of rewriting stories or reclaiming stories and even this film is a reclamation of the Candyman story by the black community, with it being written and directed by black people.

This movie also looks deeply at the commodification of black pain. The idea that black art is only valuable when it comes from pain or that a black woman is only skilled and talented once she has experienced enough pain. It calls out this commodification in such a blatant way that doesn’t allow any room for excuses. There’s a scene in the movie where Anthony shows off his work and he says that even though there’s not much room for interpretation all that matters is that you can feel the visceral pain from his artwork and I took that to be a broader comment about this movie in general. It’s hard not to get the message about the commodification of black pain but the movie doesn’t care it just wants you to understand how painful this is to constantly demand more and new trauma from black artists when it will never end up being enough.

Finally, I thought the performances throughout this film were phenomenal. You really get a sense of how much Anthony and Bri care for each other and the way that Anthony breaks down throughout the movie as Bri does her best to help is so hard to watch because you just want everything to work out for them. Burke’s performance throughout the film is very good and his work at the ending is phenomenal even if I don’t like it in context.

Now onto the things that I wasn’t particularly a big fan of. The scene in the art gallery and the scene in the high school bathroom were completely unnecessary in my eyes. They both feel like trailer fodder, meant to make the movie seem more like a cheap slasher than it actually was. They really break up the film and make it just seem bogged down. The art gallery scene does actually have a purpose throughout the story but I think that the tone doesn’t really match with the rest of the film but the bathroom scene is completely egregious with how unimportant it is. Quite literally you could cut it all out and all you would lose is 15 minutes of the movie which is so fucking annoying to me because it would have been so easy to cut it out.

I also thought that a lot of the dialogue is kind of clunky. This goes back to the idea of this film not leaving much up to interpretation but in doing so character’s have random conversations about gentrification which halt the movie as it begins to read off the definition of gentrification just in case someone in the audience doesn’t know. It’s really bad and it’s made all the worse when there is a better more natural conversation about gentrification later in the film which could have served more as giving a name to the themes that people would be noticing throughout the film.

Now that we’ve reached the ending it is now time to talk about my least favorite part of the film, the ending. The movie goes from 0 to 100 extremely rapidly and seemingly out of nowhere. For me, at least, I remember thinking, “Oh, we’re at the end” because it literally came out of nowhere. The ending also feels like the ending to a completely film and I think moments like this are when the 3 different writers become very evident since there was a lot of things that didn’t get wrapped up and this ending feels like the ending to someone else’s draft just taped onto the final draft with a random piece of double sided tape.

I really like the ending in isolation. I think the idea of the black community fully reclaiming Candyman by making their own is so heartbreaking but understandable because they’re doing it in an attempt to protect themselves. I love the horror of the ending and the twist that Anthony gets shot and becomes Candyman BUT in context with the film, it all happens too suddenly to really make sense. I feel like Burke’s character gets entirely warped at the end because he never had any inclinations of having these desires before literally in that moment. Anthony goes in and out of lucidity for seemingly no reason which doesn’t help and overall the ending just decided to shoot for the stars while being faced in the wrong directions which leads the ending to feel so disconnected from the rest of the film.

Overall, I really enjoyed this film. I think the themes and visuals really carry this film to victory where the script stumbles in some spots. It is definitely worthy of being a successor to Candyman (1992) and I look forward to rewatching this in the future.