Helen Lyle , a plucky, white graduate student researching urban legends in Chicago, is drawn to the city’s dilapidated Cabrini-Green projects, where she learns of a monster named the Candyman: a vengeful Black ghost who appears if you say his name five times while looking in a mirror.
But the legend around him, and his tragic history, is what gives him his power, and the director Nia DaCosta zeroes in on this notion for her sequel, also titled Candyman.
DaCosta, who co-wrote the film with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld, had an exciting debut with her thriller Little Woods and is already working on a Marvel movie.
The protagonist of DaCosta’s Candyman is also an interloper of sorts: Anthony McCoy , an art-gallery director who encourages him to find new sources of inspiration for his work.
Instead, Anthony’s fascination develops into a sort of appropriation, as he turns the Candyman stories into a series of frightening artworks that evoke the trauma visited on Black men for generations.
DaCosta emphasizes Chicago’s changing landscape as much as she can—the original film’s opening credits show the city from the point of view of a camera flying overhead, but DaCosta depicts Chicago from below, gliding through its streets and gazing up at the skyscrapers.
But narratively, I was most drawn to Anthony’s guilt over telling a story that isn’t his own, and the unsettling way in which the artistic community embraces him as the buzzy flavor of the month.
The film simply doesn’t have enough time to offer more than glancing commentary on police brutality and institutional neglect while also trying to focus on the original movie’s thorny allegory and Anthony’s artistic troubles.
But in DaCosta’s movie, Anthony starts to transform into the creature himself, a script choice that serves only to sideline the film’s protagonist as he grows more zombified.