Candyman 4K 2021 Ultra HD 2160p

The film is something of a "spiritual sequel" to the hit of the 90s of the same name. The action will take place in modern Chicago. The original tells the story of the ghost of a slave who faced dire treatment on plantations in the 1800s. After many years, his spirit returns and begins its retribution.

Candyman 4K Review
The up-and-coming artist Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), who works in contemporary art galleries, with his girlfriend Brianna (Theiona Parris), is moving to Cabrini Green in Chicago. Previously, it was a half-abandoned ghetto - now modern houses have been built here and turned the place into a paradise for young and progressive. But even after all the radical changes, the locals have not forgotten the legend of Candyman, a maniac with a hook instead of a hand, who kills anyone who utters his name five times in front of a mirror. In a previously unknown urban horror story, Anthony is attracted by her artistic potential: he devotes a new work to Candyman and soon becomes obsessed with him (figuratively and, possibly, literally - in reflections he sees himself in the image of a mythical killer). Inappropriately, a series of bloody murders begins in the neighborhood, and the artist's hand is slowly covered with something resembling a terrible honeycomb.

The original "Candyman" is one of those horror films that have never been super popular with a wide audience (certainly not to the same extent as, say, "A Nightmare on Elm Street" or "Friday the 13th"), but they found a cult in the circles of fans of the genre. Back in 1992, Bernard Rose's film used the form of a slasher to comprehend urgent social problems through it - the artificial creation of a ghetto, the indifference of the authorities to the problems of poor areas, where violence reigns everywhere, and people are so afraid to leave their homes that fear eventually materializes in the form a terrible maniac with a hook for a hand. It is clear that the killers from "Halloween", "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" and the same "Friday the 13th" always reflected certain public fears - but in "Candyman" the characters themselves pronounce the social origin of the maniac (it is not for nothing that the main character is a scientist trying rationalize the phenomenon of urban horror stories).

It was enough for Jordan Peel and his team to literally re-shoot the original, and the new Candyman would have already been called super-topical - so much the ideas embedded in a picture of thirty years ago resonate with the spirit of our time. But the authors, fortunately, had the courage to go further, to try to comprehend what Candyman as an idea means for the modern African American. Someone who no longer lives in a ghetto, but in a hipster neighborhood after renovation; who exhibit in museums with paintings and make friends with the intellectual elite, but still twitch when they hear the sound of police sirens. Bernard Rose's film already hinted at the timeless essence of a maniac: its appearance, we recall, was associated with the lynching of a dark-skinned artist from the 19th century who dared to fall in love with a white girl. Nia DaCosta's version complements the idea by saying that Candyman was never actually one particular person. This is the same artist, and a good-natured fool who handed out sweets to children, and then was killed by the police without trial, and all the other unfortunates, undeservedly torn apart by the xenophobic crowd over the past couple of centuries. It doesn't matter if Cabrini Green is a poor ghetto, a trendy neighborhood or someone's farm at the moment: there will always be Candyman, there will always be death, there will always be injustice.

If Michael Myers is reborn outside of any logic, then Candyman does not die, because he never was alive - he is just a concept, a shabby legend, the real reasons for the emergence of which are remembered by rare old-timers. The film famously shows this mythology of the monster in a scene where one of the characters incorrectly retells the events of Rose's original painting: since then, she has gone through a hundred "tainted phones" and turned into the same urban horror story. The heroes of the new "Candyman", unlike their predecessors, are not very much interested in the veracity of the myth. Their emotional significance is more important to them, the pain inherent in the story, which cannot be expressed in any way. It's not just that the main character here is no longer a scientist-researcher, that is, a person is not from the rational world. He is his complete opposite, a contemporary artist looking for a way to tell the world about Candyman through abstraction and paint.

The story of the impossibility of expressing meanings through art is generally unexpectedly one of the most interesting aspects of the new Candyman. Anthony is charged with the idea to tell about the problems of poor areas through an art project about a folk maniac, but he cannot find a suitable language: his paintings are declared banal, his method works too "head-on", and in general, they say, we have already heard and seen all this hundreds of times. If in the old "Candyman" the inhabitants of Cabrini Green complained that no one cares about them, now the problem is that they are being talked about too much - so much so that reality becomes blurred, turns into a cliché, meaningless set of symbols and images. Just like Candyman himself, whose name stupid children pronounce in front of the mirror, having no idea what is behind it.

Jordan Peel and Nia DaCosta's reboot is nearly perfect in how he adapts the original text for a new context - not repeating the myth or continuing it, but rather expanding, making Candyman a national image. The film can even be perceived as a manifesto for a new African American art, one of the pioneers of which is Peel: an art that actively searches for its own handwriting and is not afraid to go ahead, because all other paths have long been cut off. How well his "Candyman" works as a horror or slasher at the same time is a much more obscure question. This movie is not scary at all (and often wittily ridiculed by the genre's cliché), hiding the brutal murders behind editing cuts and much more interested in the psychological fall of the protagonist than in the bloodthirstiness of the maniac. But, again, this was the original (minus the humor). The striking difference is in some carelessness with which DaCosta's Candyman moves from scene to scene. Often episodes seem to break off or begin for no reason - there is, for example, a very weak section with Anthony's mother that comes out of nowhere: it is needed exclusively for exposure. The film is about a man who has not found a suitable language for his expression, and he himself seems to be frantically looking for the right style, intonation, tempo rhythm and, like the hero, fails in this, returning to primitivism and banality as the only way to say at least something - that is intelligible.