I watch a lot of movies, but it’s rare that I walk out of the theater and want to turn right back around to watch that same movie again immediatly. Ryan Coogler’s Blues and Blood Drenched Southern Vampire Elegy “Sinners” more than warrants such devotion. A bold, violent, intimate, radical experience, the New Orleans filmed “Sinners” represents the movies as they were always meant to be made and shown; on the biggest screen, through the grandest narrative canvas, with the most to say in the most entertaining way. I’ve never seen a movie quite like “Sinners”, and I’m doubtful you have either.
Set during 1932 in Mississippi, “Sinners” ostensibly follows the newfound entrepreneurial exploits of a pair of identical twins returned home after years spent in war and gangland employment up North, Smoke and Stack (played to perfection by Coogler’s “Black Panther” and “Creed” collaborator Michael B. Jordan). Smoke is the calm yet quietly hot-headed older brother, with raging waters running deep and a foundational belief that power in the world doesn’t come from magic but from money. Stack, on the other hand, is smooth, a glad-hander and showman. While Coogler styles the twins so they are ever distinguishable from each other, Jordan’s performance takes the reins almost instantly, with each brother becoming so fully realized and lived in that their love feels real and pure, love for each other and for the loved ones they are returning home to.
The prodigal twins hope to open a juke joint, a place of solace for their black and minority neighbors living in the midst of Klan country with plenty of ill-gotten whiskey to go around and the finest blues music in the Delta. This was prohibition time after all. The rum runner days. The Capone days. The days when violence was a way of life across the country, and persecution, particularly in the South, was as common as cicadas screaming at sunset. “Chicago’s just Mississippi with taller buildings,” opines Stack to his young, Blues guitar-playing cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton, who nearly steals the movie). The twins have learned that there are vipers in every corner of this world, and sometimes it’s better to fight the devils you know. Sadly for them, there are new devils stalking their home, ones who are old and hungry and feast on the souls of the downtrodden and oppressed.
The story of Robert Johnson looms large over “Sinners”, the legendary guitar player who is said to have sold his soul to the devil to embody the blues; a legend that has been warped beyond its intended meaning. In the original incarnation, Johnson did not sell his soul to some pitchfork-toting Christian Devil, but to a trickster god of African origin called Legba. Coogler, a devotee of authenticity in each of his films, is on record as saying that this is his interpretation of the myth, as anyone who has seen “Sinners” can readily attest. From the opening frames and notes of Ludwig Göransson’s masterful score, it is soon apparent that, while vampires are promised and will undoubtedly deliver the bloody goods, music is the magic that Coogler ascribes to. The ache of the blues, the wail of a singer on a stage; these are not simply performances, but conjurings also of ancestors, tragedies, and triumphs. Music, perhaps unlike any other form of expression, is transformative in that way, transmogrifying who we are, were, and could be with those who heard those notes and songs long ago and are now long dead. There is a sequence in the movie, the grandest statement in a film overflowing with them, where Coogler exemplifies this point in a manner that overwhelmed me to the point of tears through a manifestation of life and love and dance and culture that spoke more to the soul of man in one song than most articulate in an entire body of work. I was moved and transported. It felt like magic.
The greatest horror films, the ones that aspire to more than shock and gore, always offer audiences a story as rich and fully formed as any drama before blood starts spilling. For the first forty-five minutes of “Sinners”, Coogler paints vistas of meaning from the sun-baked cotton fields of Mississippi and the lush backwaters of the bayou as Smoke and Stack reunite with friends and family alike to put on their opening night extravaganza. We spend so much time with them, their regrets and dreams, that one might be forgiven for forgetting we sat down in the theater for a vampire picture. Once the sun is gone and we see our friends joined together for a night of song, dance, and drink, Coogler has cast his spell on them and us. There is joy in their reunions and couplings, there is salvation in their lost loves and unrequited passions; from Smoke’s estranged wife Annie (a staggering Wunmi Mosaku), to Stack’s lost love Mary (the always incredible Hailee Steinfeld), and even a washed up Blues Man (the immortal Delroy Lindo) and their Delta Chinese neighbors (Li Jun Li & Yao). These people deserve all the happiness they can scrape off the husk of a world that has long abandoned them, and for a brief moment, the world allows them to bask in the blues and the love of a life they’ve built for themselves. But this is a horror movie after all. So, with the deftness of a born storyteller, just when we couldn’t love these people more if we tried, Coogler lets the monsters loose, and “Sinners” delivers on the vampire goods to devastating effect.
I have never seen vampires like Coogler’s. While their basic function is familiar, fangs and flight, and the need to be invited into a place, their motivation is far from the norm. As the lead vampire Remmick, Jack O’Connell (“Ferrari”, “Unbroken”) offers a tantalizing proposition to our friends in the juke joint. See, these vampires are drawn to the eternal power of music, specifically the power wielded by Sammie and his guitar. They don’t want to subjugate but “liberate”, to consume Sammie’s magic and assimilate it for all the immortal blood suckers to share. The image of a melting pot was forefront in my mind as Remmick and his growing band of acolytes descended upon our heroes. There are caverns of gold to be mined from the themes and intricacies that Coogler is playing with here, oceans of meaning and intent to be sifted through that I am still absorbing and will require a second or even third viewing to fully comprehend. While Coogler does not shy away from the obvious human evils plaguing our heroes, the true horror of “Sinners” is the forced homogenization of one into many, of a soul into a hive mind, and of an artist into a product for commodification and exploitation.
There’s nothing I love more than a vampire blow-out, and rest assured, the thrills are more than aplenty. But while the marketing might indicate otherwise, this is no “From Dusk Till Dawn” rehash. Coogler is asking us to reckon with more. This is an adult film with adult themes for adults to consider, a film crafted with love and the purpose of an artist utilizing vast resources to say something profound and personal. There is magic in “Sinners” and I can’t wait to fall under its spell once again.
Filmed on beautiful IMAX 70mm, “Sinners” is showing on film at the Prytania Uptown Theater. It is the way that Ryan Coogler intended for audiences to see his latest and, in my humble opinion, his best of a nearly perfect run of nearly perfect films.
Let the music consume you.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Sinners” is playing at Prytania Uptown in 70mm, Prytania Theatres at Canal Place, and The Broad Theater.
