Candyman

In Bernard Rose’s 1992 film Candyman, the title character was played by the towering, velvet-voiced Tony Todd, who used a hooked hand and plenty of gravitas to sear himself into the cultural consciousness. He returns for Nia DaCosta​’s sequel, which reframes that figure as the victim of a sadistic lynching and the first in a series of Candymen born out of the extremities of Black pain. This film, as well as being faithful to the timeline of the original, serves as a commentary on it, and asks us to re-examine white saviours and Black boogeymen.

Written by DaCosta with Win Rosenfeld and Jordan Peele, Candyman has all of the seething racial commentary of Get Out, but where that film examined modern liberal white supremacy with plenty of humour, DaCosta goes hard into intergenerational Black trauma, police brutality, the commodification of Black pain and gentrification.

It’s a lot to pack into its 91-minute runtime, and occasionally the dialogue is weighed down with heavy thesis, but Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Teyonah Parris and the always-excellent Colman Domingo strike a balance between characterisation and IDEAS. Abdul Mateen is particularly impressive, both as a glistening sculpture of a man who matches Todd’s presence, and as a performer who unravels with committed physicality.

There are so many interesting choices that DaCosta makes throughout. She frames towers, skylines and corridors with surreal disconnection that creates an urban topography as unnerving as The Overlook Hotel. Unexpected perspectives and slow zooms sit alongside a low abstracted score with a nauseating use of bass.

Many of the scenes of violence are entirely fixed on a single perspective or from a disquieting distance, recreating the brutal brilliance of Let the Right One In​’s famous swimming pool massacre. This, combined with shadow-puppet flashbacks, some impressively nasty body horror and thrilling use of mirrors, creates a far stranger and more fascinating film than expected.

Much has been debated about what the Black gaze versus the white gaze means and never has it been more clearly laid out than in this sequel, where white women inaccurately explain the Black community’s problems to them and DaCosta asks us to question who gets to be a monster and who gets to be a white (Black) knight riding in to save the day. While the film never seems to settle on Candyman’s agency and a few interpersonal relationships could have done with more than a single scene, this is still a searing and exceptional piece of work.

DaCosta’s love of the genre and its potential are clear and hers is possibly the most exciting Black horror voice since Peele. Let’s hope that after the time spent in the MCU we see more of her riveting nightmares.