Tim Burton Is Back in His Element of Amusingly Macabre Whimsy with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice

The prospect of the legacy sequel is one typically either tied up in motives of pure profitability or an exciting, newly realized opportunity to expand an old franchise in ways not explored before (and even the best of these latter types of belated follow-ups are typically generated by the former). More rare is the idea that a director of an older, original property could use the material not only as a chance to return to their roots, but to redeem themselves in doing so—getting their artistic groove back by returning to one of their most notable works. That’s what fantastical horror mainstay Tim Burton has done with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

While these legacy sequels can seem like craven cash-ins even at the best of times, Burton returning to the world that helped to kick his career into overdrive after he debuted with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure feels more shrewd than disingenuous. The quality of Burton’s films has always varied wildly, but ever since the 2010s it’s seemed Burton had lost touch with the heart of the analog, macabre weirdness that helped to establish his prominence in the first place, becoming the target of tepid responses or all-out critical ire with films like Dark Shadows, Big Eyes, Dumbo and Alice in Wonderland, one of the most egregious digital abominations that came out of the previous decade.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice takes Burton back to what he does best: silly-scary horror-comedy that at once feels lovingly homespun and vibrantly realized. His ambitions aren’t high with this 35-years-later sequel, but they don’t have to be. In returning to a world with a solid foundation but relatively unexplored fringes, mysterious enough to expand on the rules of the afterlife or make them more pliable to his liking, Burton seems keen to let loose. His work isn’t bogged down like so many of his later films. It’s a trifling diversion, but it’s also Burton’s most comfortable, freewheeling and satisfying movie in years.

As implied, this is a Beetlejuice sequel through and through, bearing all the meaning that may have to you depending on your relationship to the original material. To me, it means a thinly sketched-out story with broad ideas of characters that exist to deliver an assembly line of clever, gross and funny sight gags which, to be fair, the film is packed to the brim with. This sequel’s existence harkens back to a time where something like this was released out of Hollywood without much in the way of pomp, nor circumstance. Though, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice acts as something of an inverse to its predecessor: Whereas the first film follows a relatively simple throughline of small-town domesticity coming crashing down under the sudden cognizance of life after death, its sequel is defined by an excess of storylines, all vying for their claim to a meager slice of the 100-minute runtime.

But where we begin is relatively simple: Years after her encounter with Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) and the Maitlands, Lydia Deetz (Winona Ryder), still decked out in her goth attire, is now the host of a tacky haunted house reality show called Ghost House, produced by her overzealous boyfriend Rory (Justin Theroux). Death doesn’t take long to rear its head: Lydia receives word from her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) that her father Charles has died in a morbidly comic manner that allows him to be portrayed as headless once he’s revealed in the afterlife (a necessary choice to eschew the presence of disgraced actor Jeffrey Jones). Lydia, Delia and Rory pick up Lydia’s semi-estranged daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega), whose disbelief in all this ghost crap only makes her further resent her mom following the death of her father. They return to the town of Winter River for the funeral—and to sell off the old house that the Deetz family once shared with the spirits of the Maitlands who, according to Lydia, have since figured out how to “move on.” (“How convenient,” quips Ortega.) It’s there that the old miniature diorama of the town is discovered by Astrid—as well as paraphernalia related to Betelgeuse that insinuates he may be primed to return.

Meanwhile, Betelgeuse is on his daily grind as a working stiff in the afterlife, now a manager in a paper-pusher office staffed by a bunch of those great shrunken-head guys from the first movie. Still pining after his lost opportunity to marry Lydia, he’s made aware of a new threat to his life of being a scuzzy pervert and causing people weird bodily mutations: Delores (Monica Bellucci), his soul-sucking ex-wife (as in, she literally sucks souls) who’s going around turning the residents of the afterlife into barren sacks of empty flesh. She’s coming after Betelgeuse, and he needs to figure out how to save his own skin. Through all manner of improbable and convoluted developments, Betelgeuse’s and Lydia’s story threads eventually converge under pretenses Lydia never thought possible—she may need Betelgeuse’s help again.

If Beetlejuice Beetlejuice already sounds plenty busy, don’t worry, there are at least three or four other subplots we don’t have the space to fully account for within the context of the larger story machinations: Rory suddenly proposes to Lydia to be married on Halloween; Astrid meets a like-minded boy who may know more about life after death than he’s letting on; Delia has her own grim misadventures; Willem Dafoe shows up as a dead B-movie actor turned gumshoe detective who treats the job like a method performance as he trails Delores’ crimes. I must be forgetting at least one or two others. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is overplotted to the point of being downright hyperactive compared to the relatively quaint original, always bouncing around from one story thread to the next, trying its damnedest to make them cohere into something that makes sense during its modest runtime. That doesn’t quite happen, and the series of events is so frantic that each new train of thought ends up underserved, in turn making the overarching narrative seem thin—the story feels like it’s picking up right as the film is ending.

Luckily, the previously mentioned laxity that Burton brings to Alfred Gough and Miles Millar’s screenplay helps make the frivolous stakes more feature than bug, as do the commitment of the stacked cast and the return to wonderfully realized practical sight gags and spooky, neon-laden sets. The world of Beetlejuice is an exceedingly strange one, and the performers, new and old, ride the right tonal wavelength that intersects between the absurd grotesquery and the earnest character drama the script attempts to ground them in as we ping-pong between the living world and the kitschy, uncanny world of the dead.

Of course, Keaton returns to his role like it’s nothing, perfectly inhabiting the weird, greasy demon sleazeball with a bit more screentime than he was afforded in the original. When you’re watching him make his own guts spill out of his torso or off-handedly impregnating someone with a Betelgeuse baby that goes on to wreak bloody havoc, it’s fairly simple to wave off whatever structure is trying to reign this all in. This is the same world where walking through the wrong door will send you to the psychedelic desert realm where stop-motion sandworms will try to eat you alive—and this is apparently just an understood facet of what happens after death. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice makes the case that this hand-crafted, unpolished disorder is really what gets Burton’s juices flowing.

Director: Tim Burton
Writers: Miles Millar, Alfred Gough
Cast: Michael Keaton, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, Justin Theroux, Jenna Ortega, Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci
Release Date: September 6, 2024

Trace Sauveur is a writer based in Austin, TX, where he primarily contributes to The Austin Chronicle. He loves David Lynch, John Carpenter, the Fast & Furious movies, and all the same bands he listened to in high school. He is @tracesauveur on Twitter where you can allow his thoughts to contaminate your feed.