‘Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’ Review: A Jubilant Sequel That Exhumes the Tim Burton the Old

Tim Burton’s belated sequel to 1988’s weird, wild, and hilariously macabre Beetlejuice abounds in morbid, nauseating delights. The afterlife that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice envisions is a blacklight expressionist trip, perhaps not as grungy and edgy as it was in the original film, but it’s a confident, playful, and frequently slimy vision from the man who defined those things for multiple generations. And the way this film sees it, there’s nothing waiting in the hereafter as frightening, traumatizing, or horrific as what life itself can do to people.

Despite the fact that Beetlejuice’s (Michael Keaton) grotesque rotting mug is all over the promotion for the film, Burton and screenwriters Alfred Gough and Miles Millar have remembered just how sparingly he was used in the original film. Beetlejuice is a wild agent of chaos utilized to destroy and devour scenes, not anchor them. Keaton is gloriously unhinged in those signature stripes, and he still gets plenty to do, especially since he’s got his own problems in the underworld with his murderous ex-wife, Delores (a deliciously vampy Monica Bellucci), sucking the life out of anyone standing between her and reuniting with Beetlejuice.

Thing is, for the original Beetlejuice, it was the dearly departed Adam and Barbara Maitland’s failing attempts to scare the terrible Deetz family out of their former home that moved the plot. Here, Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis are relieved of duty, explained out of the film with a single line of dialogue, while the demise of Jeffrey Jones’s Charles Deetz—an IRL necessity handled with an excellent little stop-motion sequence—is the catalyst of the plot, bringing the remaining Deetzes back to the family house, and Beetlejuice Beetlejuice’s true intentions into focus.

Winona Ryder’s Lydia is now a 50-year-old elder goth, whose ability to see the dead has landed her a career as a psychic medium on television, a case of crippling social anxiety, and a clout-chasing, gaslighting lamprey of a boyfriend, Rory (Justin Theroux). Her stepmother, Delia (Catherine O’Hara), is now a Marina Abramovic-style performance artist, pouring her neuroses into her Manhattan art gallery. Astrid (Jenna Ortega), Lydia’s daughter from a deceased ex-husband, is an outspoken atheistic know-it-all who wants nothing to do with her broken family but finds herself dragged into their paranormal shenanigans anyway.

This is a memorably grim tale about three generations of women actually learning to sit and cope with the death for the first time. And Burton’s greatest accomplishment here may be the way that he lets his camera sit alongside his female leads, suppressing his frequent urges to cram oddities into every frame and simply observing Lydia, Delia, and Astrid as they act manically, messily, and resentfully, before eventually accepting each other.

There’s patience to these stretches, and somehow O’Hara always finds the over-the-top laugh in a line delivery or mannerism that doesn’t shatter the mood. When a bad decision lands Astrid in the great beyond, and the fantastical, grisly elements invade, they feel earned, with the film never forgetting that it’s spinning a tale of generational trauma. Beetlejuice himself even acts as Lydia’s therapist at one point, literally and metaphorically spilling his guts to her and Rory.

There are still plenty of big moments that stick in the mind when the credits roll—a massive musical number set to Richard Harris’s “MacArthur Park” is a bizarrely beautiful showstopper—but arguably the thing that’ll make Beetlejuice Beetlejuice endure is that it feels like the most honest, human, and heartfelt tale that Burton has told in decades. The fact that it’s also a film where two half-eaten torsos fist-bump in the afterlife just makes it even more special.