Ryan Coogler has quietly become one of the most reliable and exciting blockbuster directors working today. More so than, say, Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer aside, to quote Walter Chaw, “There’s not there, there.” Coogler at all times, takes what he did with Fruitvale Station and blows it up for the mass audiences. He takes what has become an exercise of neutered artistic expression for the mythical four quadrants and makes intimate dramas that explode with emotion, action, and visuals.
Sinners is no different. Yet, the most refreshing thing is how this vampire tale set in the deep south of 1938 Mississippi is decidedly not for everyone. It is a horror film made for adults by adults. “Is that drool?” “You want some?” Sinners is an unapologetic gorefest that finds itself slipping into kink all while the threat of something unspoken lingers.
That the script, also by Coogler, is as sprawling as it is untethered, is a weakness to be sure. But the breadth of Coogler’s swings is the real spectacle.
In baseball, there is a moment when a batter hits a foul ball, and for a brief instant, you sit there, fists tightened, holding your breath, waiting to see if it stays fair, followed by the inevitable heartache when it sails into foul territory. Watching Sinners feels like the moment before the disappointment, because while the ball never leaves the park, there’s something so refreshing about seeing a director take such huge swings for what, for most other filmmakers, is merely a genre film.
As a lover of genre films, I don’t think this is a bad thing. It’s that with Coogler, Sinners doesn’t feel like trying to make horror respectable so much as Coogler reaching into his soul and his imagination and spreading it across the silver screen. Weaving folklore, history, and music while exploring how all three influence and inform cultures and characters would make for a heady movie no matter who made it. That Sinners works as well as it does, even with its faults, is a testament to Coogler’s talent.
Perhaps it is because Sinners is chock-full of little things that tickle my cinematic funny bone. Things such as having movie stars play dual roles like Michael B. Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack. Or using old recognizable faces that Hollywood has largely cast aside. I won’t lie about how I squealed with delight at the sight of one of my favorite character actors, Delroy Lindo, as the drunken musician Delta Slim.
Or maybe it’s the way Coogler dots the landscape with songs ranging from the Blues to Irish folk. That’s right, Sinners is a low-key musical, albeit with a haunting sinister undertones to its rhythm and blues. Sinners moves with an easy gait, all the while, hinting at something over the horizon. The white Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) representing the dangers of white well wishers wishing to gain entry to Black spaces.
The story is simple: Smoke and Stack have returned from Chicago to start a juke joint, Club Juke. They rope their nephew Sammie (Miles Caton) in to help with the music alongside Delta Slim. Along the way, they get the gang back together which includes Bo (Yao) and Grace (Li Jun Li) Chow, the Chinese couple who run the local store and happen to provide medical care for gunshot victims and seem to have a monopoly on the local black market. However, my favorite was Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) as the cotton picker brought on to watch the door. A job he excels at-until he doesn’t.
As the opening night unfolds, a series of little dramas begin to collide and explode. Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a part Black woman who is passing white, confronts Stack about their past. Sammie attempts to get together with Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married woman who may or may not be all that married.
Steinfeld as Mary is a subtle performance that utilizes her expressive eyes, along with other aspects. Mary struggles to find her place in the world, being bi-racial she’s often shunned by one while conscious of her whiteness in the other. But tied in with her is also the intoxicating aspect of the taboo. Steinfeld oozes a kind of simmering sexuality that sizzles but never explodes, so we can see why Stack would be drawn to her.
But then the vampires come in.
I didn’t check my watch, but the vampires themselves aren’t introduced until at least thirty minutes, maybe even an hour, into the movie. Either way, until their arrival, Sinners could very well be a ripping yarn in the vein of Southern Gothic. For there is a menace, a threat of something, at the edges of the screen. But the meat is the roiling passions and simmering history of the characters converging onto a place during one fateful night, the air electric with possibilities.
Coogler and his camerawoman (for Coogler always works with women behind the camera), Autumn Durald Arkapa, make Sinners hum with portent. Every scene feels like a page ripped from some long forgotten novel as we meet characters, and relationships become clear, all the while Arkapaw’s camera follows like a stalker.
Many might be aware of the technical achievements of Sinners. How Coogler and Arkapaw invented a new kind of IMAX film strip, 65mm, how he plays with aspect ratio changes, and has several versions of the film available for the public to see. The testament to Coogler and Arkapaw’s craft is that I saw it in the worst possible conditions, at a local AMC, and whoever programmed the playlist didn’t even bother to set the cues for the aspect ratio shift.
I tell you this because at times Jordan’s face all but disappears in the shadows, and I couldn’t tell if that was Arkapaw and Coogler channeling Gordon Willis love of darkness obscuring faces or AMC’s inferior projection qualities. At times, Sinners seems to be on the verge of being swallowed by shadows, yet I am unable to tell to what degree it was intentional. It didn’t matter; I was transfixed and transported all the same.
The problem with Sinners is that, for all its themes and breathtaking visuals, and daring craftsmanship, the emotional beats never have the desired impact. Coogler and his composer Ludwig Goransson are vigilant that we are kept in suspense, that we are aware of the evil that lurks both in broad daylight and in the darkness of the night. But while I was left exhilarated by the end, it was mostly by the craftsmanship and joy of Coogler’s artistry.
Despite Jordan providing yet more evidence for his case of being a movie star, his dual role as Smoke and Stack is a tour de force, if only because both through technical wizardry and in-camera effects, Jordan doesn’t treat the roles as a showcase. Instead, he wields his charisma differently in both roles, treating each character less as a parlor trick but as a role to bring alive. Which he does.
Something that is on display in the way both Smoke and Stack communicate with their partners. Stack and Mary have a history, but it is one fueled primarily by sex and a deep connection of feeling othered by a world, but who struggle to find the courage to express themselves. The polar opposite of Smoke and his estranged wife Annie (Wumni Mosaku) who also doubles as the Van Helsing of the story. The death of their infant son haunts both Smoke and Annie in the same way Mary’s love haunts Stack. But for Smoke, it’s the shared history and deep connection and love for the other that keeps him tethered to Annie.
Coogler’s sex scenes showcase the differences in their relationship yet the similarities of their desires. To see such frankness about sex in a big-budget movie had me close to screaming “Hallelujah!” Not to mention the way in which Annie and Smoke are more open about their desires as opposed to how Mary and Stack seem to dance around what they want.
But the tour de force of Sinners is the scene where Sammie plays for the crowd at Club Juke. Sinners opens with a voice-over regaling us about how different cultures believe that music can be a doorway between past, present, and future. In addition to being a siren call for things that live in the night. So, for most of Sinners, we are waiting. Waiting for Sammie to play the guitar and sing and call forth the evil we know is out there.
The scene where Sammi plays for the club, for the first time, is nothing short of one of the best pieces of cinema I’ve seen all year. Coogler, Arkapaw, Goransson, and his editor Michael Shawver, come together to create a tapestry of images and sounds that reaches into our collective subconscious and reveals an ecstatic truth about the power of music-and art-in general to a culture.
A sense of unsettling and empowering beauty spills out from the scene and flows into the rest of the movie. From then on Sinners goes from intriguing to a rollicking good time, even as it’s sturdy legs begin to wobble. Sinners lack focus and any real narrative anchor. However, Sinners never feels ungainly or lost, merely unmoored at times.
Did I mention Delroy Lindo was in this? Because he is. Seeing him dig his teeth into a role like Delta Slim was like chicken soup for my soul.
Yes, Coogler abides by the old rules of vampirism. Yet, I can not recall a more effective use of the rule requiring vampires to be invited in. Not only that, but they should return to that well so many times and find new ways of making it work. From racial, to pitiful, to menacing, Coogler finds a new slant each and every time.
Howard Hawks once described a great film as a movie with “Three great scenes and no bad ones.” My friends, there are more than three great scenes and I can damn sure testify as there being zero bad ones.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros.
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