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.