Sinners is the best vampire movie brought to the big screen in years. Sorry, Twilight fans. In Ryan Coogler’s hands, Sinners is a bold, sexy, muscular, pulsating genre film. It’s not enough to call it simply a horror movie. Its themes burn and reverberate like bluesman Robert Johnson playing his guitar for the Devil at the crossroads. It’s a film that works as so much more than popcorn entertainment, although it definitely does on that level, too. The film, Coogler’s first purely original effort, takes all of the things vampires have always stood for, such as sexual and religious deviancy, the incursion of threatening cultures, and enhances them with masterful direction and storytelling.
I mentioned Robert Johnson for a reason. Sinners isn’t the first film to use the myth of Johnson selling his soul to the Devil for success as a creative influence. The other is a personal favorite of mine and I couldn’t stop thinking about it the whole time. Walter Hill’s 1986 film Crossroads, starring a young Ralph Macchio and Joe Seneca as bluesman Willie Brown, was a clear influence on Sinners in sweaty Southern juke joint style, and presentation of the blues as the devil’s preferred choice in music. And like Crossroads does, Sinners sets out to redeem the blues and to steal it back from the enduring threat of appropriation. As Delroy Lindo’s drunken bluesman Delta Slim says, “White folks like the blues just fine; just not the people who make it.”
If it sounds like a lot is happening in Sinners, well, that’s because there is. There isn’t a moment of his 137-minute runtime that goes to waste, not an inch of the IMAX-shot screen that isn’t filled to every corner. Set in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, the film largely takes place over a handful of vivid locations. One moment we’re enduring in the daily pain of sharecroppers tending the fields, in the next we’re in a bustling, multicultural economic center. After an ominous prologue featuring R&B singer Miles Caton as Sammie, the literal son of a preacher man, being forced to choose between his music and something just as eternal, time jumps back twentyfour hours. Riding into town like bulls into a China shop are the Smokestack twins, with Coogler favorite Michael B. Jordan as brothers Smoke and Stack. Former soldiers, they left for Chicago nearly a decade earlier, and have come barrelling back home, with a bunch of stolen mob money and loot, with a dream of opening their own juke joint. They seem to know that waiting doesn’t do people like them a lick of good. The juke will open that very night and what a night it will be!
Both halves of Sinners are very different, and also extremely satisfying in their own ways. The first hour is slower paced and focuses on the twins gathering the people and the tools necessary to make their juke joint dream a reality. It allows Coogler to indulge in rich character and world construction, through the tried and true formula of “team gathering”. It’s like a gathering of the Jim Crow Avengers. Sammie is the first recruit, his guitar and lyrical gifts teasing a connection to generations of others with musical gifts that can cross time and space, good and evil. Along with Lindo’s Delta Slim, there’s also the Asian couple (Li Jun Li, Yao) who own the local grocery and can whip up signage right quick; bruising security Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), and Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a local voodoo practitioner whose connection to Smoke runs far deeper than mere romance and betrayal. There’s genuine pain and loss between them that gets revealed much later, and informs the weariness he carries that Stack clearly doesn’t. Both brothers are fearless, but Stack has a a feral quality that makes him instantly recognizable, we don’t need the red and blue identifiers after more than a few minutes. Others fit into their orbit, as well, including the woman Stack was hoping wouldn’t follow him, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who presents as a scorned mistress but we come to find out is so much more.
The second half of Sinners is more like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Til Dawn, but even that feels sorta reductive. I mean, to the best of my knowledge that cult favorite never featured a down home blues performance so soulful it literally tears into the fabric of time, allowing Coogler to incorporate DJs, breakers, ancestral African dancers, and more jammin’ like House Party or Zion in The Matrix Reloaded. Nor were the vampires Irish jig enthusiasts, led by the wolfish Remmick (Jack O’Connell), who promises these poor, mistreated Black people an eternal respite from the anguish he knows they seek to escape from. No more fear, no more racism. It’s a seduction that is too delicious to be true because, well, of course it is. If I had a major complaint with the film it’s that I wish the vampires were more, well, scary. They almost come across as jokes, at least until the epic showdown of fangs and fury and fallen characters we’ve spent so much time coming to love. The eventual payoff of bloodshed and gore, later followed by a passionate epilogue (with a notable cameo that blues fans will love!) that ties everything together, will leave crowds eager for more sin.
Warner Bros. opens Sinners in theaters on April 18th.
