Rejoice! ‘Sinners’ is a gift to moviegoers
Ryan Coogler cements himself as one of his generation’s most exciting voices with “Sinners,” a genre-fluid powerhouse that is handily one of the year’s best films. Reuniting once again with his muse Michael B. Jordan (and two of him, at that!) for his fifth film, his first original story since his first film “Fruitvale Station” put him on the map (and had studios plucking him to do “Creed” and the record-breaking “Black Panther”) is a glorious ode to so many elements it feels ridiculous listing them all, packaged in a horror gift-wrapping that gives those elements a novel sheen.
Jordan stars as the Smoke/Stack twins, recently returned from (allegedly) serving as enforcers for Al Capone in Chicago. They’re back home in the Mississippi Delta, with a truck full of cash and guns, and they plan to open up a juke joint out of the former sawmill just outside town. They touch base with a number of people: their cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton in a cracking debut), now a gifted blues guitar player with almost supernatural skill; Smoke’s estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku, “Lovecraft Country,” “Loki”), a practitioner of the occult whom they persuade to be their cook; their friend Cornbread (Omar Miller, “Ballers”), who will serve as bouncer; the pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo); and Grace (Li Jun Li, “Babylon”) and Bo (the mononymic Yao), Chinese shopkeepers who will supply the joint. Stack also runs into his ex Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who has just buried her mother and is still resentful at being abandoned by Stack when he left town.
While all this is happening, Remmick, an Irish immigrant vampire played by “Skins”’ Jack O’Connell, escapes some Choctaw hunters and gets saved by sympathetic Ku Klux Klan members, who he thanks by turning them into fellow vampires. Unbeknownst to the twins, Sammie’s guitar-playing has some powerful juju and calls to the creatures.
It’s the opening night of Smoke/Stack’s joint, and it’s going to collide with some very unwanted guests.
Never cumbersome
Coogler, who also writes, lays so much onto the audience in the first half, front-loading the picture before the carnage ensues and turns the entire storytelling experience on its head. But it never feels cumbersome; the world feels lived in, the characters rich with backstory.
In their interactions with the townsfolk we learn what everyone is about, and what their status is vis a vis their relationship to the twins. It’s all interesting, emotional, and efficient. Even if it is all necessary setup, it’s elegant and has personality, can be funny, exciting (as in a foiled robbery attempt), and moving.
There’s such rich drama playing out just with the premise of the twins returning home and opening their new place, that you almost don’t want it to become the horror thrill ride it becomes. But the setup has established the stakes and made the audience come to like and know these characters, so that when they are in peril everything becomes more fraught.
Even in its horror aspects, Coogler plays with established vampire lore. They need to be invited in, but they also have something akin to a hive mind, able to access one another’s memories. They can jump and hover to a degree, are fast and strong, and of course, having them corrupt and turn the bodies and personalities of people one knows and loves makes everything much worse, more horrific, more prone to lethal hesitation.
At more than one point, it beggars belief that all these elements aren’t throwing the entire experience out of whack, but it holds together in a frankly astonishing way. If we accept vampires in this story, why not magic music, able to fold in Robert
Johnson’s legendary deal with the devil? Why not the occult practices of Annie?
Coogler and company have crafted a grand blues opera with magic realism, deep roots, and connections to its setting and communities in the time it takes place, with fantastic music and performances all around, and a razor-wire act of a horror climax throttling audiences to a satisfying coda (that you might miss if you walk out during the credits).
