"Sinners" review — This hot and dusty Southern vampire tale is a blues-soaked treat
“We gonna kill every last one of you.”
Under the oppressive heat of the Mississippi sun, which over the expanses of white cotton fields and dusty, unpaved roads, the infamous Smokestack twins — veterans of the Great War, former minions of the Capone Chicago crime circuit, and prodigal sons of the South — return home. It is a dark time for the South in the early 1930s. The Great Depression obliterates the agricultural economy, racist Jim Crow laws brutalize the African-American community, and cotton field workers are paid in plantation-issued “wooden nickels,” while the emergent music of the time is both demonized and appropriated by white America. Taking ownership of a deserted saw mill from a local white businessman, the Smokestack Twins are out to make it big with a juke joint for the local Black community, armed with a truck full of Irish beer and a particular penchant for blues music, to make its grand opening that very night. As the sun goes down, with the aroma of music, fried food, and northern imported alcohol steaming from its door, the club finds itself full of the rural folk abandoned to the margins of American society. It’s freedom, at least for a night. Soon, the hypnotic slide guitar and powerful blues tunes begin to attract not only his community to the juke joint but also malevolent forces from the interspace between the living and the dead who thirst for blood.
Stewing in the history of the early 20th-century American South and African-American culture, Ryan Coogler’s electrifying Sinners is not only a carefully constructed historical epic, but unabashedly, and refreshingly, a genre film. A strong contender for a year-end highlight, there’s so much to love and be surprised by here. Sinners is a full-blooded vampire horror film, with all of the bells and whistles of the genre, but mixed with a delicious blend of unique cultural and historical stylings to make it feel a cut above the rest. Shot in glorious 65mm film and soundtracked with haunting guitars, Sinners roars with the energy due to its Southern Gothic sense of mood and atmosphere. The performances are earnest and aggressive. The score by Ludwig Göransson is intense and full of blues-inspired charm. The moment-to-moment editing and scene construction lead to some of the most memorable and evocative movie moments in a long time (including one particularly euphoric scene in the club that I won’t give away here). Coogler, the film’s director and sole writer, has made something magical and visceral, something that grabs onto the viewer with intensity and leaves its bite marks in the skin long afterwards. Both deeply invested in its narrative and cultural influences, yet feeling like nothing that has ever come before, Sinners is a deep breath of fresh air.
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| Photo via Warner Bros. |
Leading Sinners’ expansive ensemble is Michael B. Jordan as twins Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore. Mining so much depth from the complex history and relationship between the two brothers, Jordan brings two excellent performances, managing to not only play off of himself, but also create two characters that are so fully realized and full of deep complexity. This, of course, feels well-timed with the release of Robert Pattinson’s twinning performance in Mickey 17 just last month. But Jordan’s ability to add distinctive interiorities to each man that serve as the culmination of their social standing and place in history, while also making them feel like two sides to the same coin, puts this performance in the same league as Jeremy Irons’ in Dead Ringers (1988). The twins’ arrival in their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, is a homecoming of mixed emotions for them and for the rest of their community, as the two meet the pain and frustration caused by their long absence. Each one of the brothers left a love behind. For Smoke, it was Annie (played by Wunmi Mosaku), his estranged wife, who had embraced her role as a practitioner of traditional West African medicine and knowledge. For Stack, it was Mary (played by Hailee Steinfeld), his wealthy, three-quarters white girlfriend, who went on to marry a white businessman in Stack’s absence.
Neither woman is particularly exuberant at the brothers’ return, although both of them find different ways of coping with it. Annie and Smoke’s relationship is scarred by the death of their infant son, a grief that has burdened both all these years later. Mosaku’s gentleness and enduring strength as Annie make her such a compelling figure to watch, especially as she is forced into the violence of the film’s third act, when the vampires come to feast. Mary’s sense of abandonment gives her a fire of anger against Stack. Steinfeld is a force to be reckoned with here, bringing ferocity, righteous indignation, and allure to the part. Jordan, Steinfeld, and Mosaku are just three of the fabulous performances to be found here. Rounding out the cast are Li Jun Li and Yao as Grace and Bo Chow, two keen Asian-American shopowners whose complex cultural identity has them drifting on either side of the intense Black-white racial divide in Mississippi; Jayme Lawson as Pearline, a smooth-talking blues singer with a thing for the twins’ younger cousin; Jack O'Connell as Remmick, an Irish vampire who slowly seduces the company at Club Juke into his world of blood and eternal life; and the ever-excellent Delroy Lindo as Delta Slim, a washed-up alcoholic piano player given another shot at success.
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| Photo via Warner Bros. |
However, it’s newcomer Miles Caton who is the highlight of the ensemble, playing Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore, the twins’ cousin and a blues guitar player who sees the return of his cousins as a chance to escape his moralistic pastor father and become the musician he has always longed to be. Now, Sammie isn’t any ordinary musician. Throughout time and across cultures, as the film’s introduction informs us, there have been people with the power to make music “so true” it can pierce the veil between life and death and past and future. Sammie is born with such a gift. This gift might be able to bring together his community into a frenzy of passion and energy, but it also sends out a call to more sinister forces waiting to sink their teeth into human flesh. Sammie’s character not only serves as the cornerstone for the narrative’s themes about culture and the nature of “sin,” (with Sammie representing a split between traditional indigenous spirituality and Christian spiritiuality in the southern African-American community) as well as being an important emotional ground, but also helps awaken Sinners’ sense of the spiritual. Caton’s rousing guitar playing and incredible bass-y vocals are not only a draw for the film’s characters, but pull the audience into the magic of the music as well. One might just begin to believe that there’s magic in the music as Sammie’s voice rings through Club Juke.
Sinners takes just shy of half its run time for the sun to set, carefully setting up the emotional context for the characters, subtly overlaying history onto the action, and setting up all of the dominoes that will soon fall. Then, things quickly shift as the film morphs into a tense, sinister second half, finding itself in more moody, atmospheric, and magical waters. The film is many different things all at once. It’s a historical drama about the Black experience in the post-Civil War South, a siege action movie, a folk horror vampire bloodbath, and a movie about the power of music. Coogler demonstrates masterful control over his flurry of influences, not only in crafting beautiful individual moments but in weaving together a film that feels like everything but never too much. With his fifth feature and first fully original film — following a slew of previous hits, including both Black Panther movies and the first Creed film — Coogler finally shows off just what he’s capable of creatively at the culmination of his first decade working in Hollywood. It is a staggering achievement, surely, and one that only excels under the weight of its many ambitions.
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| Photo via Warner Bros. |
Each of these component parts is so beautifully realized in its own right. The film’s sense of lived history is so palpable. It never feels the need to overexplain the relevant historical events underpinning the action — the twins’ connection to the war, Jim Crow laws, the great depression, prohibition, and more — but those aspects of history inform every choice and relationship. The horror elements are just as compelling. The vampires stalking Club Juke are fully accurate to the folklore, equipped with their vulnerabilities to wooden stakes, silver, and garlic, as well as their aversion to being impolite guests and entering buildings without an invitation. It is refreshing to see both Sinners and Nosferatu released within the last four months to open arms from critics and audiences, showing that not only has the image of the vampire more or less moved on from its days under the oppressive shadow of Twilight, but that there is still fear to mine from and many more stories to tell about the fangèd bloodsuckers. The musicality of the film was certainly its biggest surprise. While the film’s marketing has leaned into the vampirism of it all, music is the primary lifeblood of Sinners. The use of music both diegetically and in the score, written by the incredible Ludwig Göransson, not only serves as a compliment to the history and culture of the film, but as a love letter to the music itself, with great attention brought to the beauty of the Irish folk, Americana, blues, and gospel (as well as other surprising musical nods) presented throughout.
This is without heaping on praise to Sinners’ many other moments of filmic artistry displayed on screen. Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw captures the intense landscapes of the American South, the ambiguity of the film’s sense of magic, and the beauty of the human body with such care and precision, made all the more remarkable by the spectacular choice in film stock. Brilliant production, costume, and monster design choices abound. The depiction of vampirism visually here, from the special effects make-up to how Arkapaw captures them in frame, makes them particularly terrifying. With jarring red eyes that capture the light of flames and stars with devilish intensity and appearances that only become more monstrous the closer the dawn draws, these vampires are beautifully rendered, presenting a tempting portrait of the monster that never loses its sense of the sinister. The editing of Michael P. Shawver brings the entire film together in glorious fashion. Shawver deftly cuts together a film that sprawls without ever losing the moment, leading to, as I mentioned previously, truly euphoric moments of perfect medleys of performance, song, and cinematography. From every aspect of its construction, Sinners more than just creatively excels, it creatively leaps ahead.
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| Photo via Warner Bros. |
Sinners checks all of the right boxes. It’s a gloriously self-assured genre flick buried in history that lets heavy themes build into incredible characters while also letting its action breathe. Its use of vampirism as a metaphor here is incredibly brilliant in a way I do not want to give away. It’s wonderful stuff, truly. Sinners is the sort of film that reaffirms why the movies endure as an art form. It’s a reaffirmation of the power of the cinema as a place of congregation. This is a film that will not be forgotten quickly. It’s just that good. Coogler, Göransson, and the rest of the creative ensemble have created something very special. If you saw the trailer for this film and were a little underwhelmed or uninterested, I promise you this is not the movie you think it is. And if you saw the trailer and were moderately excited, this is a film that is so much better than you could want. Always one-upping itself with its set pieces and narrative, this is a film with the power to last in the zeitgeist for a very long time. You’re worse off missing Sinners in theatres. Yeah, it’s that good.
Sinners is now playing in theatres.
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