Candyman (2021)
There’s something to be said about the “requel” trend. I’ve yet to find one that’s disappointing, actually. Halloween (2018), Scream (2022), and Mad Max: Fury Road all tell their tale so well, and without ruining what came before them. It helps that, for most of these, they go on without changing what we knew about the original. Scream (2022) comes pretty close, admittedly, but I don’t find that movie’s wrinkle to be all of that consequential to the original film as a whole.
However, there’s also something to be said about a requel that does more than that, a sequel across time that reframes what exactly we think we knew about the series. The Matrix Resurrections is a notable one, and so is Candyman.
Set in 2019, Candyman follows artist Anthony McCoy. He lives in the now-gentrified Cabrini-Green area of Chicago, and while trying to make his next great series of pieces, comes upon the tale of Candyman. However, when he goes to research it, he’s told that a man named Sherman Fields was Candyman, beaten to death by police in 1977 for a crime he didn’t commit. As Anthony tries to make sense of things, he edges closer and closer to the slippery precipice of the Candyman himself.
I don’t consider this movie’s most prominent message to be a spoiler, but just in case, know that I’ll be tackling some of the plot points here, including ones that are learned fairly late in the game, so be warned.
What makes this movie so good is its approach to the mythology that the first film established. In ignoring the second and third movies, writers Jordan Peele, Win Rosenfeld, and Nia DaCosta can instead take a crack at redefining who the character truly is. What they came up with is so much better than it first appears.
Daniel Robitaille, still played by legend Tony Todd, is the Candyman, that’s true. What that entails, however, is where the biggest changes are. The Candyman is no longer just one man. Robitaille was the first, one whose hate and pain the legend would feed off of, but many others throughout time have been the Candyman. It’s not about a singular man, but rather, as one character puts it, “Candyman is how we deal with the fact that these things happened; that they’re STILL happening”.
Candyman is the collective, vengeful spirit of the victims of racially-charged crime. Beside Daniel Robitaille and Sherman Fields, Candyman is also portrayed as real-world victims Anthony Crawford, James Byrd, Jr, and George Stinney, victims of crimes you’ve likely never heard of. I hadn’t, I’ll admit it. These were men (and even a young boy) who were killed by white men for reasons ranging from false accusations to sticking up for themselves in the face of inequity. These men are Candyman - the hive that sadly fills more and more with every passing year.
This changed the mythology of Candyman, but it doesn’t ruin it. In fact, it’s so much stronger than the gothic love tale that the original dealt with. I’m not saying that that movie is bad, I actually adore it, but this movie gives weight to the man of the legend. He was always a spirit possessed of vengeance and rage, but it didn’t stop with the first man, and by the end of this movie, it won’t end with Anthony McCoy, either. Candyman will always be there, so long as black lives are snatched out of thin air for no reason.
The heaviest parts of the narrative aside, I also like the way the tale is told, as McCoy slowly slides into the same sort of mania and panic that plagued Helen Lyle in the original. While Helen’s legacy has been done dirty by the passage of time, her sacrifice is still known to those who were there that day. They simply don’t want to exhume Candyman again. Someone broke that code of silence, obviously, but still, the community came together in an attempt to stop the violence.
McCoy is played masterfully by Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, who brings an incredible range of emotions to his performance. Anthony is soft-spoken, sensitive, and trying his absolute hardest to make it work as an artist. He isn’t the “tortured artist” stereotype, but rather is a very real, very complex character. His terror in the face of the unbelievable is met with a slow slide into dissociative behavior, his grip on reality slipping from his grasp in real time. This transition is shown naturally, progressing more and more until Anthony straight up loses a hand without so much as a whimper. Everyone performed well, but Abdul-Mateen II deserves special mention.
The cinematography also needs to be gushed about. You know I’m the cinematography guy, and the work on display here is immaculate. From the title card sequence is shot like a reverse of the sequence from the original, with the camera looking up at the skyscrapers of Chicago, looking as though they descend into a murky fog. While we lose the melodramatic, gothic feeling of the original in this film, what we gain in its stead is a clinical, artistic approach, with long takes, meaningful angles, and plenty of reflection shots, just to drive it home just what movie you’re watching.
I can’t even begin to imagine how difficult this scene alone must have been to pull off.
That lost gothic tone is felt throughout the movie, but I don’t particularly mourn it. It’s an interesting thing, actually; a story written about classism in Liverpool was adapted to instead show the plight of the modern African-American, but it still told that tale through the lens of a white academic woman with no skin in the game. Over time, black culture has absorbed Candyman as its own, and this movie is the culmination of that osmosis. That opening sequence isn’t flipped just for the fun of it; our perspective is going from “above” the situation and detached, to down in the thick of it looking up.
While the ending sequence does feel a mite rushed, it still delivers a great conclusion by the end of it, and the final words of the film, intoned in the hypnotic, rich voice of the legend himself, echo how I feel about this film, and what I’ll be doing going forward:
“Tell. Everyone.”
