Avis des critiques

It takes nothing away from DaCosta to note that “Candyman” is of an intellectual and political piece with Peele’s earlier work, including “Get Out” and “Us.” Like those movies, “Candyman” uses the horror genre to explore race (Peele gets under the skin), including ideas about who gets to play the hero — and villain — and why.

The overall tone is one of wry knowingness, which is DaCosta’s achilles heel... [The film's] constant meta-commentary, and the tendency to anticipate criticism, eventually begins to grate.

"Candyman" is a work held together by thoughtful choices, and it has a lot to say. Genre conventions are themselves like urban legends, a framework that each new generation adds to and builds upon. "Candyman" is just one reason we continue to believe in them.

Does "Candyman" earn its denouement, a shift into a heavy-handed didacticism that loses much of the complicated nuance of the earlier acts? That’s hard to say, and the final act may be one of the most fiercely debated in horror since the widely misread feel-bad resolution of "Midsommar."

For all its symbolic heft and keen-eyed flair, there’s a scattershot quality to “Candyman” that has to do with the seemingly inescapable demands of its genre source. The horror-film combination of constrained tautness and calculated gore keeps some of the themes from fully developing and leaves narrative loose ends dangling.

"Candyman" is too aware of the legacy of its predecessor’s premise. In trying to wrestle with that premise, the movie falls right into its own traps where the original toed a curious line; it overreaches, most prominently for relevance, to the point of raising questions about whether the movie understands its own, initially provocative, questions... "Candyman" is more of a mixed bag than a failure, but what’s disappointing isn’t the fact of its ambition: It’s the outcome.

The result is a thought-provoking contemplation on racial injustice through the prism of horror, somewhat awkwardly serving its bloodier expectations while draping the story over the bones of the original... For all that the film does well, in trying to balance its cerebral, visceral and sequel aspects, "Candyman" appears to have bitten off a bit more than it can chew.

["Candyman"] sometimes fails to trust its audience’s intelligence enough to let us make our own connections between the atrocities of the past and the barely suppressed violence of the present. But it does amply display that this young filmmaker has style and promise to burn.

A genuinely terrifying and artful horror film that speaks with a bell-clear voice to the current moment... DaCosta crafts an eerie cinematic world that is anchored by a deeply harrowing and sorrowful performance by Abdul-Mateen, who begins to occupy a space like that of Frankenstein’s monster.

Bitingly satiric and elegantly suspenseful... [with an] astute script [that] piercingly dramatises police brutality and skewers the pretentiousness of the art world, constantly illustrating the inequalities between those in power and those at their mercy.

There’s a lot to chew on here, including, most notably, the blurring of the boundaries between hero and villain, victim and avenger. But is that really what one wants in a horror film, in which those lines are typically much more clearly defined? “Candyman” can’t seem to decide whether it wants to scare you or make you think.

[DaCosta's] talent is evident: She packs "Candyman’s" running time with artfully staged set pieces and is admirably uninterested in making a straightforward retread. But as it reaches its bloody conclusion, this film drowns in its own innovation, losing sight of its most intriguing concepts in favor of more-familiar gory shocks.