‘Candyman’ review: Awakening the fiendish legacy of Cabrini-Green, in the horror reboot you weren’t expecting

While the trailer suggests the reboot Universal Studios wishes this one were, instead of the one it is, co-writer and director Nia DaCosta has made her own kind of “Candyman” — sleek, brooding, methodical, thoughtful.

Gorehounds looking for even more splurch than the first “Candyman” delivered back in 1992 will have to wait for something else. A generation ago, that film relocated author Clive Barker’s bee-infested spirit of vengeance, born in his 1985 short story “The Forbidden,” from the grim council houses of Liverpool, England, to the notorious Cabrini-Green high-rises of Chicago.

It was a crafty, well-acted, complicatedly racist success, told from the perspective of mostly white academics out for themselves. Tony Todd’s embodiment of the title character meant actual, forceful Black representation in a genre generally more concerned with killing off Black people, where you could find them, as quickly as possible. Still, the racial dynamics were just queasy enough to make “Candyman” an uneasy sort of hit. The ‘92 “Candyman” got to its first murder (in flashback) in the first five minutes, long before the University of Chicago-Illinois graduate student played by Virginia Madsen ventured into the Black gang-controlled housing projects in the service of her thesis on urban folklore and the Candyman legend.

The new “Candyman” has a few things in common with the first one. It too is crafty and well-acted. But the racial lens is new.

The cumulative sense of anger and despair, working from a script invested in cycles of urban segregation and “renewal” that play directly into the white power structure, sets a different tone. DaCosta, whose impressive previous feature was the sharp-witted neo-Western “Little Woods,” waits a full half-hour to fully reveal the hook-handed spirit of vengeance, and to kill off her first victim in a sequence of nocturnal performance art.

The main characters are artists and curators looking for advancement. Struggling painter Anthony (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) lives with gallery curator Brianna (Teyonah Parris) in a condo near downtown. Their new place sits on the foundation of some miserable Chicago history: The building has been built on the rubble of Cabrini-Green. “They tore it down,” Anthony explains early on, “and gentrified the s— out of it.”

Only after the first unexplained murder in the gallery does the artist at the center of the new “Candyman” find his muse. Anthony pours himself into his work, creating in a fugue state a grisly exhibition he calls “Say My Name.” This refers to the say-it-five-times-and-die Candyman mythology. The movie begins with a 1977 prologue before taking things into 2019, the year DaCosta shot her film on location in Chicago. She and cinematographer John Guleserian favor slow zooms, straight out of the 1970s, and an eerie mastery of filming familiar Chicago landmarks in fresh ways. The beautiful opening credits unfold as if the audience were on a gurney, looking up at fogged-in buildings in downtown Chicago. In one scene, between Anthony and an unsavory art critic (Rebecca Spence), an interview in a Marina City apartment turns lethal and the results are filmed by DaCosta in daring long shot.

Initiated and co-written by Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfield, whose script was retooled by DaCosta, the new “Candyman” is as much a clinical study of strivers and weasels in the contemporary art scene as it is a horror reboot. Parris’ curator character, haunted by her own childhood history, never quite emerges in the writing. Colman Domingo, terrific as always — the entire cast excels — shoulders the burden of some rather stilted third-act developments. These delve into a brand of body horror I find less gratifying than other kinds of horror. Then again, DaCosta has little interest in routine shocks.

A couple of key players from the ‘92 original return here, namely Todd and Vanessa Williams, the young mother from Cabrini-Green whose baby … well, spoiler there. To each era its own “Candyman.” In some striking flashback visualizations, the shadow puppetry of the Chicago-based troupe Manual Cinema fills the screen with images of violence all too relevant: police beatings, unruly mobs, miscarriages of justice. Many will find DaCosta’s take on the story didactic, I suppose, or low on genre payoffs. I’m eager to see it a second time, flaws and all. It’s alive and awake to where we are now.

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‘CANDYMAN’

3 stars (out of 4)

MPAA rating: R (for bloody horror violence and language including some sexual references)

Running time: 1:31

Where to watch: In theaters Friday

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