In the Flesh: Candyman (2021)

Who dies in horror movies, and why do they get got? Nia DaCosta’s Candyman, a sequel of sorts to Bernard Rose’s 1992 classic horror film of the same name, seems to posit that you die for being bad and punchable, or for rote high school bullying, or for being an art critic. I can’t deny that many of my colleagues are indeed asking to get meathooked by Tony Todd, but a horror movie in which the huge majority of the main cast are never once in any kind of peril inevitably comes to feel toothless as time wears on. With the exception of bougie painter Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), no other member of the principal cast is so much as menaced by the titular specter of racist violence. DaCosta concocts another origin story for Candyman, one which places him in a kind of lineage of hook-handed vengeful haunts, but while her retelling begins with the brutal police slaying of a disabled black man (Michael Hargrove) triggered by a young black boy’s (Daejon Staeker) reflexive shout of terror at his appearance, it never fully digs into its obvious interest in the ways black people leverage white society’s violence against one another.

Protagonists Anthony and Brianna (a wooden Teyonah Parris) are gentrifiers, upwardly mobile professionals with a gorgeous apartment, realtor friends, and wealthy hipster coworkers. Candyman prods at this, generating moments of discomfort and prowling around the periphery of how rich black Americans repackage and sell the suffering of their impoverished brothers and sisters, but it goes no further. In the end it is these elites who take Candyman’s power for their own and turn it against the police, an idea which might for all its power-trippy giddiness have been fascinating in bolder hands, but which here amounts to little more than a thuddingly unearned departure from the central conceit of the film: say his name in the mirror five times and he’ll appear and murder you. Suddenly instead he’s appearing and doling out justice, butchering corrupt cops by the dozen. There’s something decidedly neoliberal about it, this repurposing of a ruined, bloodthirsty ghost inflicting his pain on his own community into an implement of righteousness.

Imagine Jurassic Park if the dinosaurs only ate the worst and most proudly ignorant guests to the titular locale, or Rebecca if Mrs. Danvers was emotionally mature enough to direct her rage and jealousy at Mr. DeWinter rather than his inexperienced child bride, or at her own repressed and homophobic upbringing and cultural milieu for separating her from her beloved mistress. Where is the tension in a world where the violence of everything from broken people to forces of nature moves precisely as morality dictates it should? The idea of Candyman as a scourge meant to show white Chicago the pain with which the city’s black community lives every day is a rich one, but in DaCosta’s film this scorching idea is trotted out with all the subtlety and emotional weight of a Call of Duty mission, delivered as a neat little bow on an experience altogether too tidy and self-satisfied.