BITTERSWEET CANDY

 

MOVIE
Candyman

Director Nia DaCosta

Review Ray Chan

It is arguably a sign of shoddy production values when a viewer struggles to comprehend what’s going on in a movie if he or she either hasn’t seen or has forgotten the original film it’s based on, and there’s no easy-to-follow recap.
    Such was the case with the much-touted, rebooted Candyman, with its progenitor released so long ago (three decades!) that even if you did manage to watch it in a theatre, you’d be forgiven for not remembering the premise.
    So here’s a quick rundown: for many years, the Cabrini-Green complex – a series of dilapidated, graffiti-riddled buildings sandwiched between Chicago's wealthiest neighbourhoods – had been showcased in the media as symbolising the horrors of public housing.
    The titular character was once, a couple of centuries ago, a talented Black painter named Daniel Robitaille, who was murdered for his love of a white woman, and in a gruesome fashion: his hand was hacked off by a lynch mob and a hook jammed into the stump, while his body was smeared with honey as a vengeful swarm of bees proceeded to sting him to death.
    His ashes were scattered across the ground upon which the public housing complex would be erected decades later, from which a legend grew. Say his name five times in front of a mirror and he'll appear – the return of the oppressed, as it were – before swiftly sinking his clasp into the summoner.
    And so the Candyman is a bogeyman born of racism, as indeed was Cabrini-Green, developed to house the under-privileged.
    But now in the present, things have changed. Set in the present day, Nia DaCosta's revival of the franchise returns to a newly-gentrified site, where the crumbling old high-rises have since been torn down and luxury developments gleam in their stead.
    The Black residents are part of the new normal: wealthy, yuppie millenials who enjoy lives of modest luxury. Among them are artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and curator Brianna Cartwright, the new owners of a sprawling apartment in the block.
    Unfortunately, Anthony is in a bit of a rut, his creative spark lost, leading him to feel he can’t fulfil his potential as "the great Black hope of the Chicago art scene of tomorrow".
    That is until he is initiated into the Candyman legend after an encounter with a former Cabrini-Green resident, which provides him with some much-needed artistic inspiration. He calls up the man to see if he can use him to help rejuvenate his mojo, and promptly gets stung by a bee. Slowly, surely, his right hand becomes increasingly infected. From there, you can predict what happens next.
    The movie certainly bears the distinctive imprimatur of Jordan Peele, who co-wrote the screenplay with up-and-comer DaCosta and Win Rosenfeld, and produced it under the banner of his own Monkeypaw Productions. It aligns almost too perfectly with the kind of satire-infused horror-as-racial allegory for which the Get Out director has been lauded.
    But the social critique in this Black-lensed, next gen Candyman lacks the clever metaphor-filled sequences of his previous films.
    Instead of trying to find cleverly concealed Easter eggs, the viewer gets them flung in the face at times: for example, when one of Anthony’s first Candyman-prompted art exhibits, a mirrored bathroom cabinet accompanied by a set of instructions for the conjuring, is entitled 'Say My Name' – boldly evoking the Say Their Names movement.

    His festering limb succumbs to rot, to be replaced by a makeshift grapnel, and becomes symbolic of how a once-healthy community in the beehive of apartment blocks has been replaced by a monster.
    Interestingly, the film posits the existence of multiple post-Daniel Robitaille Candymen, each a casualty of racially motivated violence – an attempt to expand and update the urban legend for possible future sequels, in which
perhaps they'll actually take the time to explain the mythos behind the madness.

#candyman #universal