Movie reviews

The Devil's Candy: is the breakthrough worth making?

The Devil's Candy gives a painter's breakthrough an ugly question to answer. Its heavy metal family provides a welcome alternative to the idea that dark taste makes bad people.

Whimsical Woes editorial ·

Getting better at making art is usually the encouraging part of an artist's story. The Devil's Candy makes that progress suspect. A breakthrough can look like an answer while creating a worse question: what, exactly, is this new ability asking you to accept? That is a useful horror premise for anyone tired of treating artistic recognition as an uncomplicated happy ending.

Sean Byrne's film follows painter Jesse and his family into an affordable Texas house with a dark past. His work changes, and a previous resident, Ray, wants to return. Those two forms of intrusion give the familiar new-house setup a more specific pressure. Jesse's creative life is involved in the danger, rather than merely explaining why the family has an interesting room upstairs.

The butterflies have to pay the bills

Byrne's 4:3 interview identifies Jesse's bank commission: paintings of butterflies. The detail puts a practical limit on the romantic picture of an artist waiting for inspiration. There is work to deliver, and that work supports a household. The hunger for a more satisfying creative life has somewhere concrete to start. Bills are excellent antagonists; they rarely need an origin story.

Byrne frames the story through the possible cost of becoming the artist somebody wants to be. The interesting critical move is to question the destination, rather than merely sympathize with the frustration. Making more powerful work is not, by itself, evidence that a life is improving. That distinction gives the artist's ambition moral friction without requiring us to sneer at the desire to make something better.

The paintings need to do their own work

The canvases also carry an unusually demanding job as physical props. In his ScreenAnarchy interview, Byrne credits Stephen Kasner with the disturbing paintings and recalls worrying that inadequate artwork would make the film comical. That concern makes sense. Dialogue can announce that a painting is extraordinary, but the object still has to survive being looked at. A film about artistic power ought to risk showing us the art.

The limitation is the familiar link between artistic intensity and catastrophe. Anyone tired of tormented-artist stories may find another suspiciously elaborate excuse for a man to avoid an ordinary working life. Ambition deserves scrutiny; creative work does not automatically deserve punishment.

Metal has more than one meaning

Byrne tells The AU Review he wanted an alternative family who loved each other, without making metal fans into buffoons. Shared taste can carry attachment. Dark music need not mark them as people who invited harm. It gives the film's affection somewhere to live besides a speech about family.

He also describes Sunn O))) as an invading satanic sound. Music can belong to companionship in one context and become oppressive in another. Loving frightening art and being threatened by something frightening are different relationships. A dark taste need not cancel the household's right to safety.

Questions from the crypt

Is The Devil's Candy a 2015 or 2017 film?

It premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. IFC's acquisition announcement and its 2017 release publicity distinguish that festival debut from the US theatrical and digital release in March 2017.

Who made the paintings in The Devil's Candy?

Stephen Kasner created the disturbing canvases. Byrne discusses choosing him in the linked ScreenAnarchy interview; the visible artwork is part of the film's argument, not simply an offscreen achievement attributed to Jesse.

Does the film treat heavy metal as inherently evil?

That reading misses Byrne's distinction. He describes a loving metal family while also using darker sound to suggest the invading presence. The music serves different relationships and dramatic purposes.

Sources & further reading

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