The long-awaited sequel isn’t just a nostalgic rehash, it’s a reminder of what makes the director so great.
Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh/Warner Bros.

Halfway Beetlejuice BeetlejuiceDelia Deetz (Catherine O’Hara) demands to know “where’s that annoying little goth girl who used to tease me all those years ago?” The flamboyant conceptual artist is talking to her stepdaughter, Lydia (Winona Ryder), who has grown up from the brooding teen Beetle juice (1988) about the middle-aged star of a hokey reality show about ghost hunting. But you get the feeling that’s a question director Tim Burton might as well be asking himself. The original film was born out of Burton’s frenetic creative heyday in the ’80s and ’90s, before he got bogged down in moribund Disney remakes and baffling adaptations starring (an otherwise terrific) Eva Green. Like his character Lydia, who describes what she’s done as a sellout, Burton went from a youthful infatuation with darkness to more adult concerns, including which of the two will survive in 2019 Dumbo seems like a good idea to me. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is itself in some ways a product of those concerns, both as a sequel set 36 years later and as a story about how Lydia has since found herself in the position of the distracted parent unable to connect with their own moody child. And yet, somehow, there’s nothing cynical about it. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is, instead, a return to form, with Burton and many of the earlier actors behaving strangely, crudely and, yes, gothically in both an idyllic New England town and a cheerfully bureaucratic afterlife.

In the first Beetle juicewealthy New Yorkers were as much the antagonists as the fast-talking ghoulie of the title (sort of — he’s technically “Betelgeuse” in that movie). The Deetz family first arrives in Winter River, Connecticut, full of condescension, resentment, and some regrettable approaches to remodeling, and it feels entirely in character that by Beetlejuice Beetlejuicethey seem to have returned to the city, in part or in whole. Lydia, who has retained her striking spiky bangs while switching to more Elvira-esque dresses, plays “psychic mediator” to a live studio audience while her producer and boyfriend, Rory (a slick Justin Theroux), hangs around nearby. Her daughter, Astrid (made-for-this Jenna Ortega), is away at boarding school, where she runs a doomsday climate change club. Delia has become a Manhattan art star, if her gallery-wide exhibition, “The Human Canvas,” is any indication. The death of her husband, Charles, is both the inciting incident and a convenient way to deal with the fact that the actor who originally played the man, Jeffrey Jones, is now a convicted sex offender — his head is bitten off by a shark and he’s a walking torso for the rest of the film. Charles’ funeral provides the three women with an excuse to return to Winter River. While cleaning up the house, they come into contact again with a certain foul-mouthed ghost who still holds a candle for Lydia, the woman who escaped.

Run through Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is the fitting theme of shedding malaise, whether that comes in the form of lingering grief (Astrid’s father, played by Santiago Cabrera, died not long after he and Lydia broke up), romantic inertia (Rory hides his manipulations behind therapyspeak), or supernatural hauntings. While Michael Keaton eases into the role of Beetlejuice with gusto as if he’s never been away, and the ever-reliable O’Hara is eerily unchanged, Ryder plays Lydia, affectingly, as a fragile adult stuck in the style she adopted a few decades ago, as if interrupted before she could fully grow up. When she begs Rory for one of her pills to get through the day, it’s a moment that teeters on the edge of being a little too real, but the film otherwise wears its emotional allegories lightly. Lydia may have some unfinished business from the past to exorcise, but she also has real ghosts to deal with. When Astrid, a devout nonbeliever, meets a dreamy neighborhood boy named Jeremy (Arthur Conti), she learns that her mother isn’t delusional after all about all the visions she claims to have, and the characters soon have to enlist the help of a devil whose name they’ve never wanted to say (let alone three times). That includes a stop-motion sequence, undead hallways at impossible angles, every cleverly mutilated corpse in waiting rooms you can think of, and the funny but poetic image of the Deetz house wrapped in a mourning veil. It’s all rendered in scenes that rely heavily on practical effects (including a demonic baby Beetlejuice crawling across the ceiling à la the detox scene from Train spotting).

If that sounds like a strange, skewed plot, well, the first Beetle juice moved along on its own characteristic calypso rhythms. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice trades that Caribbean beat for a disco beat that works surprisingly well, perhaps because it suits the film’s jarring energy. When Monica Bellucci, who plays Beetlejuice’s soul-sucking ex Delores, joins the dismembered pieces of her body back together to the sound of the Bee Gees, it’s a gruesomely jubilant sequence. And when the film arrives at a lip-synching version of “MacArthur Park,” there’s genuine joy in the way the musical number is staged. So many recent revisitings of old properties play like corporate attempts to reanimate the dead — literally, in the case of films like Ghostbusters: Afterlife And Alien: Romulus. But Beetlejuice Beetlejuice manages to avoid the feeling that his only obligation is to dutifully review everything familiar one more time. Instead, watching it is a small but significant relief, like reconnecting with an estranged friend and discovering that you still get along — and for more reasons than just a shared history when you were both annoying little goth girls.