Candyman (2021)

CANDYMAN (2021)

is Nia DaCosta’s conversation with the original 1992 classic. You know the story: in 1870, freed slave Daniel Robitaille (the amazing Tony Todd) was an artist who fell in love with a white woman. Her father had him tortured, mutilated and killed, his left hand replaced with a hook. Say his name five times while looking in the mirror, the story goes, and he will return and seek vengeance.

I loved the original, but knew it was black pain for white viewers (even in terms of the production, where the wonderful Tony Todd was paid a bonus for every time a bee stung his mouth. We were watching REAL black pain simulating FAKE black pain for the pleasure of audiences secretly appalled by the notion of miscegenation and eager to release that tension with fiction), the black man who was foolish enough to touch a white woman transformed into a monster as a morality play, an example of what not to do. And Lordy, did they lean into that imagery. “Be my victim” meant “be my love” and when College student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) researches him, she slides down a rabbit hole of death and madness, all of it plausibly metaphorical warning for black men and white women to stay away from each other.

HOW could I love a film which, at its core, was so problematic? Because in a sane world, with proportional representation, it would have been simply one of a spectrum of images rather than a sour note white America loves to play.

Now, DaCosta has done something remarkable: taken this problematic (but hugely…