Candyman review – fun slasher flattens out the complexities of the original

With so much of our modern critical cachet and discourse focused on the nebulous quality of timeliness, here comes a reboot/sequel of a classic horror to prove that being “of the moment” really isn’t everything. Writer-director Nia DaCosta and co-writer Jordan Peele’s reimagining of Bernard Rose’s 1992 classic Candyman takes a sledgehammer to gentrification and white people’s casual commodification of Black art and suffering, but in chasing the headlines of the day, loses the complexity and terror that made the original such an unforgettable cultural touchstone.

We pick up in Chicago’s Cabrini-Green projects a few decades from the end of the first Candyman, the events of that film turned into a local urban legend that is close to being forgotten after a massive gentrification effort pushed out most of the old residents. The myth – of a hook-handed, bee-infested killer who appears when you say his name five times into the mirror – is brought back to life by Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), a talented artist in a rut who is re-energised, and swiftly obsessed, by the story.

Anthony’s descent into a sort of supernatural madness is Candyman’s strongest thread and is very well-acted by Abdul-Mateen, lurching between terror and joy at what he has unleashed. Anthony’s loss of his mind is reflected by some brilliantly grotesque body horror, as an adverse reaction to a bee sting starts to blister and deform his entire left side. Yet, outside of his personal story, things start to get a bit more muddled.

This time out, the Candyman himself is not just one person, but three – different men who died at white hands across the history of Cabrini-Green. It allows DaCosta and Peele to make some trenchant points about the ceaselessness of racial violence in America, but these points are over-explained, and the loss of the single iconic figure of Tony Todd’s Daniel Robitaille from the original simply makes Candyman less scary.

The kills are brutal, yes, and DaCosta does find consistently visually interesting ways to frame them. But their comparative anonymity makes them less memorable than the original, and the atmosphere of menace isn’t sustained. This Candyman can’t quite marry its story with its scares, the elements too often occurring in isolation from one another.

DaCosta and Peele’s choice of victims compounds this problem. Almost everyone who dies here is a white yuppie who manages to bark out some casual racism before they get butchered. It makes the kills too cathartic to be scary, while offering “good” white audiences an escape from feelings of guilt or complicity in a way that the original – and Peele’s own Get Out – didn’t.

For all its problems, this Candyman still entertains. Abdul-Mateen makes for a really compelling lead, and Colman Domingo elevates the entire film every time he pops up as William Burke, one of the last remaining residents of the original Cabrini-Green projects. DaCosta’s use of shadow puppetry to explain the backstory of the legend is also inspired, the spindly figures subtly unnerving in a way that permeates your subconscious.

On paper, this modern Candyman should have been a sure thing, with scorching hot talent both in front of and behind the camera, but in flattening out the complexities of the original into something more right-on and less open to interpretation, something crucial has been lost. Such a team should have produced something genuinely distressing and discomforting, but instead we’ll have to make do with fun but forgettable big-screen slasher thrills. It’s not the worst trade-off, but it’s disappointingly generic – something I never thought I’d write about Jordan Peele tackling one of the great Black horror stories.

Candyman is now showing in UK cinemas.