150 Word Review: ‘Candyman’ (2021)

You’ll get hooked

Director Nia DaCosta’s gloomy Candyman reboot/sequel overflows with ideas like a greedy kid’s Halloween trick-or-treat bag. It’s a movie about police brutality, systemic racism, and the relationship between art and pain.

But Candyman is still a horror movie and DaCosta delivers the bloody goods. She hides her thoughtful messages in the scares, like a razor blade in a lollipop.

There are shocking scenes of gore and more inventive ones, like watching the murderous title character floating, his form reflected in the opened compact mirror of a slaughtered teen girl who made the mistake of saying ‘Candyman’ five times in the mirror. In Candyman, death wants you to say his name.

The first Candyman was a gruesome gothic romance horror originally conceived by Hellraiser’s Clive Barker. DaCosta’s movie is more cerebral than the 1992 version but she respects the source material. There are moments of macabre harmony between the two.