Candyman (2021)

The 2021 Candyman arrives with its demographics rearranged on purpose. A Black director, Nia DaCosta, at the helm. A Black leading man, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, as the artist Anthony McCoy, and a Black ensemble around him. In a genre that spent decades casting Black bodies as the first to die, this is a deliberate reallocation of the furniture. The film knows it, and it wants us to know it too.

The thesis, stated plainly, is racial injustice. The Candyman is no longer a single wronged man but a hive, generations of innocent Black men killed by police and mobs, with James Byrd Jr. and George Stinney named in the closing credits. Cabrini-Green's gentrification supplies the engine, and William's scheme to resurrect the legend reads as retaliation against the displacers. The commentary is woven through the plot and occasionally announced outright, as in the police interrogation near the end. Mostly it dramatizes. Sometimes it sermonizes. The line is thin and the film crosses it perhaps twice.

Elsewhere the ledger is quieter. Brianna's brother Troy has a boyfriend, present and unremarked, a small and incidental inclusion. Brianna herself proves capable, dispatching a villain with a pen and summoning the title figure through a rearview mirror, though the film's attention sits on race, not gender. Anthony's physical decay is horror, not a celebration of bodies. His unraveling is possession, not neurodivergence. A sommelier would call this vintage assertive: heavy on the tannins, unafraid of the aftertaste, and entirely sure of what it is.