Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), who could see the dead as a girl, is now grown up and has a teenage daughter of her own, Astrid (Jenna Ortega). Her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) is still in the picture, as is Rory (Justin Theroux). In the afterlife, Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) is still in the bio-exorcism business when Delores (Monica Bellucci) puts herself back together and comes looking for him. Willem Dafoe plays Jackson, Arthur Conti plays a boy called Jeremy, and Danny DeVito turns up as a janitor. Tim Burton directs, thirty-six years after the original, with Danny Elfman returning to score and Colleen Atwood on costumes. It runs 105 minutes and carries a 12A.
In a sentenceMichael Keaton is billed first and Catherine O’Hara has stolen the film by the time he turns up
Tim Burton goes back to the house and the haunt he made his name with and has a plainly good time. So do Keaton and O’Hara. The script hands them five plots when two would do, and the fun comes in bursts rather than a stream.
Thirty-six years after Beetlejuice, Tim Burton goes back to the Deetz family and finds them much as he left them. Lydia (Winona Ryder) is grown up and has a teenage daughter, Astrid (Jenna Ortega); Delia (Catherine O’Hara), Lydia’s stepmother, is still in the picture. The film that follows runs 105 minutes, is built mostly out of rubber and latex, and is often funny. It also carries two more plots than it can hold.
O’Hara is the reason to go. Delia treats everything that happens to her as material and speaks to everyone as though they had wandered into her gallery by mistake. The script by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar gives her the sharpest lines and the only running joke that pays off every time. Keaton, when he arrives, is exactly as we left him: the mould, the striped suit, the patter delivered too fast to be argued with. He is billed first and on screen for perhaps a third of the film. Burton is careful with him, and a little stingy.
The team has built rather than rendered. Mark Scruton’s afterlife is a civil service of green corridors, numbered tickets and waiting rooms where the dead sit holding whatever came off them. Haris Zambarloukos lights the living world in orange autumn and the afterlife under flat fluorescent tubes, so the dead look faintly seasick. Colleen Atwood puts Delia in black cut like sculpture and Monica Bellucci’s Delores in a scarlet body-stocking held together with staples. Bob (Nick Kellington), credited as a Shrinker, is a man in a suit with a very small head, and every time he walked into frame we laughed. Danny Elfman brings back the old theme and the plucked strings and does not pretend to have anything new to say with them.
Delores’s entrance is the film’s best sequence and it comes early. She is in a storeroom in pieces; she drags a staple gun across the floor and puts herself back together limb by limb, and Burton shoots it slowly, with a pleasure in the mechanics that we had not felt from him in years. We laughed and were slightly appalled at ourselves. Then the script sends her down corridors sucking the souls out of clerks for the rest of the film and never gives her another scene as good.
The story, credited to Gough, Millar and Seth Grahame-Smith, runs at least five plots. Justin Theroux plays Rory, a man the film dislikes as much as we did. There is a boy called Jeremy (Arthur Conti), and what comes of him we will not describe. Willem Dafoe turns up as Jackson and is a joy, and his whole thread could be lifted out without leaving a mark. Jay Prychidny cuts between these quickly, and no thread gets long enough to matter. A scene ends when its joke does. The mother-and-daughter story the film wants for a heart gets a few quiet minutes, and Ortega, handed the one part written without jokes, plays it straight and is rather wasted.
The first film had one haunted house and one problem. This has the same family and a dozen, and it does not feel long so much as crowded. Around the hour mark we noticed we had stopped following who wanted what and were waiting for the next thing made of latex. We were never bored. We were never quite carried away either, and given how much of this is Burton doing what he does best, that is a pity.
It carries a 12A and is gentler than the suit suggests: the horrors are rubber, the blood is green, and the nastiest object in it is a staple gun. Take someone who saw the first film at the right age and does not mind being pandered to; there is a musical number late on that pandered to us, and we did not mind. The latex looks better on a big screen.
Most critics agree that Tim Burton has found his old appetite again, and that this is a legacy sequel built on practical effects and callbacks rather than polish. The praise clusters around Michael Keaton, whose energy is credited with carrying a tangled plot, and around Catherine O’Hara, singled out repeatedly for the funniest scenes. Several reviews warm to the mother-daughter story between Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega, and a few call it the most human thing Burton has made in years. The reservations are just as consistent: too many subplots, a slow start, and a sense that it is a good time rather than a match for the 1988 film. The spread is narrow, with nobody hostile. The sharpest dissent comes from the Los Angeles Times, which finds it manufactured and asks why it was summoned at all, while Sight and Sound thinks Keaton gets too little screen time for the film to go properly wild.
The sequel reinvigorates Tim Burton’s stale brand by returning to practical playfulness and the tangible strangeness of his early career, aided by a game returning cast.
Read the full review →The sequel succeeds in capturing the manic energy of Michael Keaton's Beetlejuice and the original film's hyperstylised DNA. It is derivative yet pleasingly idiosyncratic, with gleefully silly moments and a fun, rough-around-the-edges approach that has a lot of fun trying to recapture the cult appeal of the 1988 film.
Read the full review →The film is fun if a bit messy, strongest when it embraces Burton's weird style and Keaton's energetic performance lifts the tangled narrative.
Read the full review →It offers enjoyable, inventive fun with visual flair and callbacks, but a wayward narrative means the belated sequel won't live too long in the memory.
Read the full review →The enjoyable sequel recaptures much of the original’s ghoulish spirit and features some delicious moments, especially Delores’s entrance and the central mother-daughter relationship. It remains scattergun and throwaway overall, though visually striking and driven by Keaton’s larger-than-life performance.
Read the full review →Tim Burton’s return is a satisfying if woolly goth hokum ride, lit up by a bigger role for Michael Keaton and strong turns from Catherine O’Hara. It holds together through helter-skelter momentum despite some clangers and subplots that feel like a collage.
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1988 · The original: one house, one ghost, and no interest in explaining itself.
1992 · Streep and Hawn refuse to die properly; the effects are rubber and the malice is real.
1996 · Peter Jackson’s ghost comedy, before the hobbits, with the same taste for gags and goo.
1977 · Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Japanese haunted house eats schoolgirls, cut like a pop video and just as cheerful.
1987 · Hong Kong’s afterlife: wire-work, wigs, a tree demon and a shy tax collector in love.