Review: The return of 'Candyman' — a sequel? a reboot? — is a brutal and brilliantly executed horror thriller with a lot on its mind

Brilliance and beauty sometimes come from the most unexpected places — and certainly a reboot of a ‘90s horror franchise, “Candyman,” is an unexpected place to find such an artful, shocking and relevant movie as what director Nia DaCosta serves.

The new film is being marketed as a “spiritual sequel” to the 1992 horror thriller, which starred Virginia Madsen as Helen Lyle, researcher delving into the poor Chicago neighborhood of Cabrini-Green to explore the urban legend of a hook-handed serial killer. The killer, played then by the iconic Tony Todd, is summoned when a character looks into a mirror and says his name five times.

The movie turns out, for reasons that should be experienced, to have a more direct lineage to its predecessor. 

After a prologue set in 1977 in the Cabrini-Green projects, which establishes one version of the Candyman legend, DaCosta (co-writing with “Get Out” auteur Jordon Peele and his producing partner, Win Rosenfeld) brings the story to the present day. Now, Cabrini-Green has been gentrified, and artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) and his girlfriend, Brianna Cartwright (Teyonah Parr’s) — who’s a curator in an art gallery — have moved into a loft there.

Fishing around for an eye-catching subject, Anthony hears about the Candyman legend, first online — learning Helen’s tragic story — and eventually into the unreconstructed parts of Cabrini-Green. 

His first creation, “Say His Name” — a title that plays on the movie’s tag line and the chant heard in Black Lives Matter protests to memorialize George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others — opens in a show at Brianna’s gallery, incorporating a mirror and grisly images. Soon, life imitates art, and Brianna’s boss (Brian King) and his girlfriend (Miriam Moss) are slashed to death after the girlfriend says the unspeakable name into the mirror.

Anthony’s exploration of the legend, listening to old cassettes of Helen’s notes (giving Madsen a vocal cameo), takes its toll on his body — a bee sting on his hand starts to fester — and his mind. It also leads Anthony to William (Colman Domingo), a laundromat owner who reveals the depth of the legend, and how it reflects (no pun intended) the long history of Black men dying because of white men’s fear. 

“Candyman is how we deal with the fact that these things happened — that they’re still happening,” William tells Anthony. “Candyman isn’t a ‘he.’ He’s the whole damn hive.”

DaCosta — who explored race and poverty in her intense small-town drama “Little Woods” — delivers stunning visual moments throughout the film. She creates a dread-filled tension with her composed images of Chicago’s skyline and the Cabrini-Green landscape, and the horror set pieces are as perfectly rendered as they are chilling. (The mirror motif gets a workout, even in the studio logos, but never feels old.) For the flashbacks, as the Candyman legend is laid out, she employs a series of shadow-puppet images (created by the Chicago-based group Manual Cinema) that are among the most harrowing and beautiful images you will see onscreen this year.

Abdul-Mateen — familiar as Bobby Seale in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” or as Dr. Manhattan in HBO’s “Watchmen” — makes Anthony’s descent into madness compelling, and he’s well paired with Parris (Monica Rambeau in “WandaVision” and future Marvel titles), whose ferocity and intelligence pays off in a gut-wrenching climax.

What’s most gripping about “Candyman” is the way DaCosta, Peele and company take the frame of Bernard Rose’s atmospheric 1992 film — remember the Philip Glass score? — and build a modern thriller that explores the horror baked into America’s cycles of racial violence, economic exploitation and burying the evidence. Whether a viewer comes away feeling righteous revenge or stomach-churning guilt depends on what they brought into the theater with them.

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‘Candyman’

★★★★

Opens Friday, August 27, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references. Running time: 91 minutes.