91 min | R | August 27, 2021 | Universal Pictures
Say his name five times into a mirror and he comes for you. A Black artist in gentrified Chicago digs up the legend and turns his own neighborhood’s trauma into gallery art. The monster was never the man with the hook.
Anthony McCoy is a Black visual artist looking for a subject that will revive his stalled career. He lives in a gentrified Chicago loft built on the bones of the Cabrini-Green housing projects. He hears the legend of Candyman, the vengeful spirit you summon by saying his name five times into a mirror. Nia DaCosta turns the urban legend into an essay on gentrification and the long history of racial violence in the city. The film argues that the monster is not a single hook-handed killer but a recurring American crime that gets rewritten every generation.
Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Anthony as a man who mistakes his own destruction for inspiration. He builds his best work out of a wound and does not see the wound spreading through him. Teyonah Parris plays Brianna Cartwright, his partner and gallery handler, with a watchful steadiness that grounds the supernatural material. Colman Domingo plays laundromat owner William Burke as a keeper of the neighborhood’s memory, and he delivers the film’s mythology with the patience of a man who has waited years to tell it. Nathan Stewart-Jarrett plays Brianna’s brother Troy for comic relief and exposition. Tony Todd returns as Daniel Robitaille and reminds the audience why the original legend still carries weight.
DaCosta directs from a script she wrote with Jordan Peele and Win Rosenfeld. She stages the legend’s backstory with paper shadow puppets, flat black figures moving against lit backdrops, and the device keeps the violence at a deliberate remove. Her camera loves mirrors and reflective glass, and she frames Anthony in skyline reflections and elevator panels until the city itself seems to be watching him. The kills happen at a distance, often in the far background or caught in a compact mirror, which trades shock for dread. The high-rise photography turns gentrified Chicago into a sequence of cold vertical surfaces.
The ideas arrive faster than the film can dramatize them. DaCosta loads the story with gentrification, police violence, and the question of who profits from Black pain, and the horror engine strains under the weight. The compressed structure rushes the final act and asks the mythology to do work the characters have not earned. What lingers is the imagery and the argument rather than the scares. This is an ambitious reinvention that respects its audience more than it frightens them.