What a crazy, compelling mess of a film!
Sinners’s weirdness has real power in a number of sequences, with writer-director-producer Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed, Fruitvale Station) generating a memorably intense atmosphere in his depiction of 1930s Mississippi, where the evil of Jim Crow oppression runs up against paranormal evil in the form of vampires who have an interesting offer to make suffering black citizens. How about eternal life and superhuman killing power?
A blessedly original film in an era increasingly dominated by stale remakes, sequels, and franchises, Sinners has struck a real nerve with the public. Its excellent $63.5 million opening, which is pretty extraordinary for an R-rated, non-IP-based oddity like this one, was strangely downplayed by Variety, which emphasized that given its $90 million budget, “profitability remains a ways away.”
That earned the venerable old film industry rag a sharp rebuke from actor-director-producer Ben Stiller: “In what universe does a 60 million dollar opening for an original studio movie warrant this headline?”
Sinners concerns a pair of hard-living twin brothers, Smoke and Stack Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan, Coogler’s longtime collaborator), who are veterans of brutal childhoods followed by World War I combat and then years of experience as hired muscle in gangland Chicago. They think they’re tough enough to return to the Deep South and take on “the evil we know” in their old hometown. Armed to the teeth and loaded with suspicious amounts of cash, they plan to open a juke joint at an abandoned sawmill. And they tell the white landowner who sells it to them, Hogwood, that any Ku Klux Klan member who sets foot on their property is guaranteed an immediate violent death.
There’s no more Klan around here, Hogwood tells them.
Uh-huh.
The return of the Moore twins sets off ripples through the rural community, some disturbing, some giving rise to fresh hope. The women the twins left behind — Smoke’s estranged wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and Stack’s former girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who can pass for white — feel old resentments and longings come back to life. The twins’ musically gifted nephew, Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), is going to get his chance to play blues guitar at the new juke joint in defiance of his upright preacher father Jedidiah Moore (Saul Williams). And the juke joint promises not only a good time for impoverished sharecroppers and other hard-pressed local workers, but high-paying jobs if it’s a success.
Still from Sinners. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
Hard-drinking local legend Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), an ace on harmonica and piano, gets drawn into the Moores’s vision of a black-owned and -run establishment celebrating the blues as surely as married singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson), Sammie’s lover. Hulking field worker Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), who’s hired as the bouncer, is swept up in the community effort along with the Chinese owners of the local grocery store, Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo Chow (Yao), drafted to supply food and make the sign.
And it’s the music that links them all in a transcendent flow summoning spirits from past and future, as we see in the exhilarating opening night of the juke joint when Sammie makes his solo debut. Caton as Sammie has such a hypnotically beautiful baritone, he helps make this fantastical scene genuinely moving. The film’s ambitious score by another frequent Coogler collaborator, Ludwig Göransson, draws on a wealth of blues history as well as contemporary talent like Brittany Howard and Bobby Rush.
Be sure you stick around through the credit sequence at the end of the movie, in order to see legendary blues guitarist and singer Buddy Guy, now age eighty-eight, play a significant role in the film.
Another indication of Coogler’s ambition for Sinners is the fact that it was shot on film by Autumn Durald Arkapaw (The Last Showgirl, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) in two different aspect ratios using Ultra Panavision 70 and IMAX 65. This reportedly delayed its release because of the scarcity of film stock labs in which to process it.
The film’s “genre-fluid” quality, as Coogler puts it in interviews, deliberately evokes such influences as Stephen King’s vampire novel ’Salem’s Lot as well as rowdy movies by Robert Rodriguez — especially the bloody, pulpy, comic horror film From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) — and the Coen brothers. There are several clear citations in Sinners to the Coens’s O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000), another film set in 1930s Mississippi about the South’s tortured racial history conveyed memorably through roots music.
The impression of messiness left by the film has a lot to do with the tone shifts between interludes of horror, raucous comedy, and serious drama, though there are also some crudely written scenes and one-note characters to contend with. But just because Sinners isn’t a great film doesn’t mean it’s not lively and bracing entertainment arriving at movie theaters at an ideal time.
Still from Sinners. (Warner Bros. Pictures)
As the narration in the opening of Sinners tells us, playing such transcendent music as the heart-wrung blues runs the risk of calling up evil as well, as many Deep South legends attest. Robert Johnson supposedly met the devil at a rural crossroad in order to exchange his soul for supernaturally great guitar playing ability, and he’s only the most famous example of such a swap. In the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, it’s Tommy Johnson who’s there at the crossroads at midnight.
In Sinners, evil takes the form of a nineteenth-century Irish immigrant vampire named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), escaping from his Choctaw captors in order to prey on the locals. Soon his vampire band is laying siege to the juke joint in one of the goddamnedest cinematic sequences I’ve ever witnessed. While he’s out there singing some lively but eerie Irish song to terrorize the juke joint patrons, with the grinning vampires dancing in a ring around the building, you already feel gobsmacked.
But then in a moment of hair-raising hilarity, Remmick starts dancing a demonic Irish jig. It’s like witnessing a projection of some loony nightmare you had after watching an old PBS documentary about the crossover of Irish and African musical influences mingling in the slave-era South that led to tap dancing as we know it today.
Anyway, in spite of its many recognizable allusions to other movies — as well as its participation in Jordan Peele’s extended project of tackling anguished black history in America through the horror genre in films like Get Out (2017), Us (2019), and Nope (2022) — there’s nothing like Sinners.
It’s as wild, at times, as an idea that emerged directly from the id and was never revised. I recommend it based on that fact alone.
