By Francisco Silva -
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners doesn’t hide what it wants to be. Even if you missed all the trailers, didn’t look at the poster and avoided every review, Coogler doesn’t want you to be surprised that vampires suddenly appear halfway through this two-hour-long blockbuster. Coogler starts the story with a little and ominous animated introduction and then leads us to the end of the tale – a man covered in blood, holding the neck of a guitar, enters a church and interrupts the priest’s sermon. At a certain point, Coogler says, it will all hit the fan.
It’s the 1930s, prohibition era, in Mississippi, and the boy is Sammie (Miles Canton in an auspicious debut). Sammie is the local preacher’s son, but his dream lies outside of the Delta, playing the guitar, to his father’s dismay, who sees Sammie’s music as the call to lure the devil. On a fateful morning, Sammie joins his twin cousins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), who returned to the region after making a name for themselves as gangsters in Chicago. Smoke and Stack have a plan to buy a cellar and open an establishment in a remote location where the local African American community can safely listen to music and drink alcohol.
This is the first hour of Sinners. Two charismatic men organise a sick party for their friends and family, and they recruit the help of a group of people eager to leave their circumstances. Sammie will play music with the help of a local washed-up blues singer, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo). Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) works in a cotton plantation and is happy to earn extra money as a bouncer. Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s ex-partner, offers her services, while Stack’s ex Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) invites herself into the party.
Everyone is ready, the stage is set, the people start pouring in, and we have a party. But nearby, a group of vampires, led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell), is led to the party by a tune Sammie plays. And what a tune it is – a powerful yearning and mourning melody that is both despairing and exciting like how music should. This scene, in particular, is a tour-de-force of filmmaking – a long, uninterrupted shot swerving around the people singing and dancing as the ghosts of past and future join them in that present. I doubt we’ll see a better scene all year.
From that point on, like From Dusk Til Dawn, Sinners shifts gears to a different genre. Coogler, who also wrote the script, sets the scene so perfectly that he doesn’t need to rely on more exposition or character development. By then, the pieces are so well placed that he can devolve into complete mayhem and not get distracted from the central message of Sinners.
Good horror is not without meaning. In fact, it’s essential to its reason to be. The genre was perfected in literature and cinema to explore taboo themes by cloaking them in a veil of schlock and exploiting the powers they wouldn’t take seriously. From there, it has represented culture much more effectively than drama, action, or comedy. Coogler is so aware that he gives Sinners layers of ideas slowly explored in a thematic puzzle I’m still trying to wrap my head around. It’s about the collective trauma of the African Americans in the Jim Crow South and the spectre of violence from the system structure around them (KKK and all). But it’s also about how the culture that defines us is inherent to ourselves and will determine the future. Coogler drops all this sometimes subtlety, sometimes with the bluntness of a hammer.
For example, the head vampire is being chased by the Native Americans, who warn the local white (and racist) population about the perils of the creature. This consuming evil takes on two klansmen and uses the allure of music and dance to attract more people to its cause? It’s not a basic metaphor; it’s an important one Coogler wants everyone to understand. And it elevates what the film represents without cheapening its premise.
Horror is so easily dismissed as cheap art, but, like his contemporary Jordan Peele, Coogler is a perfectionist. The script is so well structured it’s almost airtight. The characters are incredibly well-developed, even when only appearing for a few minutes. And the photography, courtesy of Autumn Durald Arkapaw, is one of the best I’ve seen in a long time. Sinners looks fantastic. The 70mm stock burns through the screen like a classic 70s film – it feels like a Cimino picture. This may be the most exciting use of IMAX since Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master. The blacks are deep and textured, and the light is powerful and imposing. Every time the aspect ratio changed to IMAX, I got excited, and the passage to typical 35mm was so seamless I barely noticed the difference.
I loved this film. It’s been a while since we saw a blockbuster as exciting and entertaining as this one. Coogler holds his references on his sleeve (John Carpenter, Scorsese, Tarantino, Laughton) to deliver a piece that feels as unique as it is crucial. It adds so much to the conversation about the generational trauma caused by colonialism (incidentally, a topic Coogler managed to partially explore in his Marvel film Black Panther). But it doesn’t cut corners – when it needs to be gruesome, it is gruesome. And when it needs to be sexy – like all vampire films ought to be – it is sexy.
And then there’s the actors. We know Michael B. Jordan can carry the film, and he’s fantastic in this double role. Steinfeld reminds us of what the Coens saw in her when they cast her in True Grit. But my favourite has to be Delroy Lindo—a beacon of powerfulness, even when the role he’s portraying sometimes dubs as comic relief. It says a lot that Lindo towers above that.
Verdict: 4.5 out of 5
For fans of great epic cinematic experiences. Part horror, part gangster period piece, part thesis on the effects of system racism. Sinners is an outlier in the Hollywood system that deserves its place next to Peele.
