Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is Tim Burton’s best live-action film since 2003’s Big Fish and his most satisfying slice of goth hokum since Sleepy Hollow (1999) – which is not saying all that much, considering the competition includes Big Eyes and Dumbo. His return to Winter River is a wild ride on a rollercoaster that never feels entirely bolted to the ground, and is all the more hair-raising for it.
Sensibly, Burton leans into the things that made the 1988 original so memorable. Keaton’s zebra-suited underworld dweller, Betelgeuse, gets much more screen time here (he got a mere 17 minutes in the first film), presiding over an afterlife call centre like a mouldering David Brent, while still holding a candle to Winona Ryder’s grown-up goth girl Lydia Deetz.
He’s a blast, matched by the dependably brilliant Catherine O’Hara as Lydia’s mum Delia, now an abstract artist known as ‘The Human Canvas’ but just as egotistical and doolally as in the first outing. She’s mourning the death of husband Charles (Burton niftily solving the problem of actor Jeffrey Jones’s disgrace with the help of a hungry shark and some stop-motion animation) and is planning ‘a multimedia visual manifesto of our loss’ at the family’s old Winter River house. Cue a surprise marriage proposal from Lydia’s toxic softboi boyfriend (Justin Theroux) and the chaotic return of Betelgeuse.
There’s two levels of nostalgia at work. Jenny Ortega’s presence as Lydia’s resentful daughter and the script by Wednesday screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar play to younger audiences clued-up on the ’80s retro vibes of Wednesday and Stranger Things. A steady stream of callbacks to the 1988 movie cater to the X-ers in the crowd. One or two of those are clangers. A funeral singalong to Harry Belafonte’s ‘Day-O’ rivals Alien: Romulus’s ‘Get away from her, you bitch!’ as 2024’s most misguided piece of fan service.
It’s Burton’s most satisfying slice of goth hokum since Sleepy Hollow
The stretches set in the dayglo-Expressionist underworld are fresher – like a tour of Burton’s brain, mid cheese dream, with a detour into The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Burton and his production designer Bo Welch cram it full of weirdo abstractions, sudden trapdoors, sandworms and shrunken heads (Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is big on small heads, one potentially problematic element Burton has declined to retcon.) A naff ‘Soul Train’, a locomotive to the great beyond that’s soundtracked by, yep, soul music, hits an unusually lame note.
Above and below ground, it adds up to more of a collage of zany subplots than a coherent whole. Monica Bellucci gets a thankless villainous role as Beetlegeuse’s old flame, who staples herself together to track him down, only to disappear from the film for a long stretch. Willem Dafoe doesn’t fare much better as an underworld gumshoe who was an actor in his past life and died doing his own stunts – a gag for the SAG members in the audience, maybe.
Still, powered by its own helter-skelter momentum and the wild-eyed Keaton, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice just about holds all its macabre threads together. It’s not Burton at his very best, but like its fiendish antihero, it does the trick.
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It’s in cinemas worldwide Sep 6.