The moment where everything went wrong was when the white people showed up to the black party -in real life as much as in the movie Sinners. At a moment of pure, transcendent black cultural ecstasy, the white folks arrive and they have never been less welcome. It plays out literally in this film, but its meaning stings well beyond the frame of the screen. There is so much truth and a lot of tragedy in the undercurrent to its sensational veneer. A movie about vampires and gangsters that speaks authentically to generations of expression preyed upon, erased, and appropriated.
In the guise of broad genre films, Ryan Coogler has strived for such authenticity, and in his first non-franchise project in twelve years, he has perhaps captured it better than ever before. And more than on just its metaphorical depth, Sinners is presented with such vigor and artful maturity -ironic given it has maybe the least mature precepts of anything he has made. He lives up to those as well though -there is some good vampire action, wild effects, and thrilling gangster violence. But the movie is not a simple gimmicky collision of genres, much fun though it may be on that alone. Like its servants of the devil, it has sharper teeth.
Set at the tail-end of Prohibition in 1932, Michael B. Jordan plays twin gangsters Smoke and Stack Moore, who return home to rural Mississippi after seven years working for Al Capone in Chicago (and having absconded with a lot of his mob’s money). Their plan is to open up a Juke Joint in an old saw mill for the under-served black community, and over the course of a day reconnect with several old associates and even a few former lovers to get it up and running -chief among them their younger cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), son of a preacher and an aspiring blues musician. But once the night sets in and the party starts, they are set upon by a growing horde of vampires.
The supernatural visitors take their time in arriving on the scene of the movie, but they are foreshadowed early in connection with a smattering of cultural mythologies that make a point of the role of music in banishing such evil spirits away. Music is the vital character of this film, it is present in almost every frame, courtesy of Coogler’s regular collaborator Ludwig Göransson, whose strong southern gothic score illuminates both this world and the tendrils of heritage that inform it. It is encompassing and powerful, and often in rhythm with the filmmaking, whether on a transition or just a detail, like the precisely timed lighting of a match. Long before the vampires show up, there is a supernatural aura associated with music, at least as a profound cultural force linking the present with heritage. As they drive through cotton fields on the heels of a tragic story from session pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) about a lynching he witnessed, Sammie plays on the guitar and he, Slim and Stack sing together a sombre song that appears to heal their spirits in real time.
And this is just the prelude -the music, overwhelming by design (though not distracting) spreads to the Juke Joint as it opens, once all of our chief characters -each set up very well- have arrived. When Sammie unleashes his magic there, the extraordinary happens. Coogler has always been a good director, and capable of bringing some curious directorial panache to the likes of Creed and Black Panther where it wouldn’t be expected. His midpoint extended set-piece in Sinners however is easily his greatest achievement as a filmmaker thus far, of a kind I would not at all have readily predicted from him; a sustained take that fully encompasses the power of the movie’s themes and honestly transcends the film itself, only resting on a beat of the dawn of trouble virtually impossible not to comprehend the true meaning of. It is the boldest stylistic choice in the movie, but not by any means the only instance of Coogler showing off. Another sequence later, likewise informed by music, is very haunting in how it is shot, and as the vampire confrontation builds and escalates towards violence, he has his fun in shooting and cutting it for real tension.
The vampires are rendered quite well in their effects and gore (without being so graphically so) and their presence comes with the distinctly creepy tenor of a context that doesn’t require them to be supernatural to ferment a scary threat. Led by an Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell), they are initially white interlopers, and the pump has been primed by allusions to the Klan, still active under Jim Crow in this part of the country. And yet the motivation that is revealed off some of them isn’t the same -in fact it is more insidious.
The relationship of white people and their institutions towards black culture and the need of a black community to safeguard it are critical touchstones here -with also tangentially the same theme on Asian culture, represented by the Chinese shopkeepers allowed to indulge in theirs at the Juke Joint and nowhere else. But Remmick states quite openly his desire to have what they have, and as the vampires turn more and more people, it is clear exactly what that means to him -assimilation. What's more, it comes in the rhetorical guise of equality, which Remmick uses in attempts to persuade Smoke and Stack's friends and patrons to join them willingly. It is a shrewd mimicry of the subtle methods of white supremacy, familiar and daunting. Music for them too forms a cornerstone, and it is disconcerting to see the way their vampiric converts partake in it. It is the foreboding contrast of what was represented by Sammie's music, and thus is why he is their biggest threat and chief target. And the means in which their attack is kicked off is stupendous, inverting the racist trope of the time of fragile white women being sexually preyed upon by vicious black men. It is fiendishly clever.
Sinners is Coogler and Jordan's fifth film together and thus another solid demonstration of the strength of their collaborative partnership. Jordan plays Smoke and Stack with enough effortless distinction in poise, gait, even speech that you forget they aren't actually separate people. The intuitive caution of Smoke is complimented by the charismatic confidence of Stack -both having individual histories and relationships informing and motivating them. These are expanded nicely through the film's extended build-up, allowing the rest of the cast to shine as well. Hailee Steinfeld is great as Mary, Stack's assertive former lover, as is Jayme Lawson as the elegant Pearline -a married woman who catches Sammie's eye. Omar Benson Miller and Li Jun Li lend character as labourer-turned-bouncer Cornbread and Chinese grocer Grace respectively; and of course Lindo steals every scene he's in, a mixture of humour and pathos. But the stand-outs are Wunmi Mosaku as Annie, Smoke's sharp and supernaturally-attuned ex-wife, O'Connell's devilishly entertaining vampire villain, and Caton in his debut performance as Sammie -a character so full of life and hope, not to mention immeasurable talent and conviction, that you understand in an instant both what he represents and why turning him matters so much to the vampires.
Legendary blues musician Buddy Guy also has a role to play, powerfully in the ending of the film, which very pointedly weaves in the movie's story to a larger cultural tapestry across time, the good of its insinuations as much as the bad. Coogler lets the film out on this and a stirring comment, albeit one mistakenly dropped into the mid-credits (he still has some of the Marvel mentality, having made this same error with the otherwise poignant ending of Wakanda Forever). Sinners is an exceptional movie, as deep as it is accessible, as unconventionally methodical as it is conventionally thrilling. It has some of the best music and best artistic uses of music as any movie in recent years. And the sinners themselves, whoever and however you think they are in this, are fresh and provocative figures. A stimulating, exciting movie to sink your teeth into.
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