By Jared Rasic
When people who write about movies come across a piece of cinema that feels monumental, there is always a list of specific words that they use to describe it. Words like “visionary,” “electrifying,” “exhilarating,” “transcendent” and “breathtaking” get thrown around with abandon (by myself included) to describe much lesser films than Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. So I will try not to be overly precious in relating to you how special this movie is.
Michael B. Jordan gives the performance of his (still early) career as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, newly back in Mississippi in 1932 after seven years of fighting in the Great War and bootlegging in Chicago with the Irish and Italian mobs. They’ve returned to their hometown with a truckload of Irish beer and Italian wine and a case full of cash, ready to immediately open up a juke joint with blues music, corn whiskey and sweaty, dancing folk in desperate need of release.
Teaming up with the great Delroy Lindo as piano player Delta Slim, Miles Caton as their young cousin (and guitar prodigy) Sammie, their lost loves played by Wunmi Mosaku and Hailee Steinfeld, Li Jun Li as Grace the cook and several others, Smoke and Stack launch their juke joint in a town where most people can only pay with wooden nickels made from picking cotton on the local plantations. When three creepy white people (whom the audience knows are vampires) show up at the door asking to be invited in, Smoke, Stack and friends are in for the worst night of their lives.
On its surface, Sinners is a vampire movie set in the Jim Crow South, but Coogler is nothing if not a fiercely audacious and ambitious filmmaker. So what he ended up creating is a staggering mash-up of the blood-soaked and boozy From Dusk Till Dawn and the Devil at the Crossroads legend of Robert Johnson, with a fat helping of Delta blues musical, Southern gothic drama and a fable about humanity’s cultural memory.
Coogler doesn’t deconstruct genre films. Instead, he makes films reverent to the genre they play around in. Creed follows the structure of the typical sports movie like it’s gospel, but does it expertly and with so much empathy that the film still feels new. Black Panther doesn’t reinvent the superhero movie; it just tells one with such profound thematic depth as to transcend its own limitations. Sinners doesn’t try to elevate the vampire movie into pretentious new heights (looking at you, Nosferatu).
Instead, it’s simply a great horror movie that deeply respects the history and lore of the creature while also recognizing that the real monsters (specifically the ones from the Jim Crow South) also come out during the day and garlic doesn’t slow them down.
You can watch Sinners and enjoy it just as a horror movie, but there’s so much going on beneath the surface that it’s a disservice not to engage with it on its own terms. Coogler has grounded the film so deeply in the Jim Crow South that we feel the danger inherent in every frame for the primarily Black characters. Stack’s fear of talking to a white woman in public is palpable, leaving the spirit of Emmett Till offscreen to remind the audience about our disgraceful past without invoking his name.
While the cast is uniformly great, the show is stolen by the timeless, grimy blues score by Ludwig Göransson and the lush, yet understated, cinematography by Autumn Durald Arkapaw. So much of the power of the film comes from the quiet beauty of the Mississippi Delta and the timeless importance of blues music that, under Coogler’s steady hand (as well as the film being shot in deeply immersive IMAX 70MM and Ultra Panavision 70mm), Sinners is a thrill ride that is going to age beautifully and eventually be considered one of the finest horror movies of the 21st Century.
As a rage-fueled scream at institutional racism and America’s ugly, despicable past, or a period romance with Molotov cocktails and arterial spray, or even a love letter to the life-affirming power of the Delta blues, Sinners defies any attempts to put its genre-fluid insanity into a neat description.
Sure, I can use a thousand different adjectives (and a hundred thousand more words) to describe Ryan Coogler’s future classic, but none of them can effectively convey how drunk on the power of cinema you’ll feel after luxuriating in its sweaty, sexy, messy and terrifying world. Being lost in the story of our collective past as we’re spellbound by a team of contemporary filmmakers and artists at the top of their game is one of the myriad of reasons that movies exist in the first place.
MOVIE: ‘Sinners’, starring Michael B. Jordan. Written and directed by Ryan Coogler. 138 minutes, playing at multiple theaters locally.
