Sinners

Director Ryan Coogler’s filmography has gone from small indie to mega-blockbuster in less than a decade. Despite working with budgets astronomically higher than his debut film, Fruitvale Station, Coogler has always retained his specific voice and clear, overwhelming sense of emotional clarity. His fifth film and first truly original one at that, is one you can qualify as a “blank check movie”. Referring to when a filmmaker, after having several successful studio films or a breakthrough hit, is given a large budget by a studio to make whatever he or she wants, with seemingly little to no creative studio input. We’ve recently seen that in Bong Joon-Ho’s spirited Mickey 17, a worst-case scenario in Joker: Folie a Deux and with Damien Chazelle’s grandiose Babylon. After having gone through the difficult task of making Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in the aftermath of the tragic death of Chadwick Boseman, Coogler returns with his own “blank check movie”. A period vampire genre-hybrid, Coogler’s latest is an audacious and sensational work that involves you into every bloody beat and operatic gesture.

Courtesy Warner Bros

Set in the Jim Crow South, Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their home town in Mississippi in 1932 after having gotten a taste of the gangster life in Chicago, supposedly working under Al Capone. They buy out an old sawmill and seek to turn it into a juke joint. Hoping to have a grand opening for their new spot, they enlist the many people they left behind to help them run it. The brothers recruit their musically gifted cousin, Sammie aka “Preacher Boy” (a breakthrough in Miles Caton), Smoke’s former lover and hoodoo expert, Annie (a commanding Wunmi Mosaku), store owners Bo (Yao) and Grace (Babylon standout Li Jun Li), grizzled, boozy bluesman Delta Slim (an always magnetic Delroy Lindo) and longtime friend, Cornbread (Omar Miller). Some of the more notable guests that show up include Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack’s old sweetheart whom he left behind in order for her to live a “happy” life (marrying a white man and having a nice home) and Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married singer wanting to escape her life and have some fun. Things go awry with the unwanted arrival of Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish, Jim Jones-like vampire who comes to them as a savior, promising a better life free from the neverending cruelty of the Jim Crow-era.

Writer/director Ryan Coogler introduces so many characters, but luxuriates in their motivations, relationships and why they all matter. Which makes the film’s gradual shift into full-blown genre territory all the more intense and, ultimately, satisfying. We spend valuable time with these people and Coogler’s script gives just about everyone in his ensemble ample room to make the characters feel real. Smoke is a world-wearing former soldier, while Stack is a braggadocious and slick hustler. In not just one, but two stellar Michael B. Jordan performances, the Coogler regular continues to flex his acting chops in exciting, challenging fashion.  

An early scene shows Delroy Lindo’s Slim recounting a lynching of one of his friends and during this monologue, Coogler subtedly throws in echoes of the events of what the character is describing. In reinforcing the film’s heart, the blues, Slim immediately begins humming a blues song in order to calm himself down. The filmmaker is effortlessly painting the audience a picture with simple, yet inventive direction. Early moments between Jordan and Mosaku feel delicate after they reunite several years apart and find themselves still living in the aftermath of the death of their child. Coogler doesn’t rush his character development, he allows it to breathe. The first hour is also occasionally funny with real bursts of wit.

Having directed several blockbusters while retaining his gifted cinematic vision, Coogler plays with so many varieties of filmmaking, while never losing his firm grasp of storytelling. Overflowing with creativity and audacity, Coogler’s gusto is a force to be reckoned with. Several sequences here are, bluntly, mind-blowing, namely a musical number showing the historical influence of the blues. Coogler, in his hazy, haunting atmosphere, showcases entire lifetimes — past, present and future — of musical influences all partying together in the same, time-bending space, conjured up by the power of Delta Blues. Rarely have we seen magical realism so boldly displayed by an American filmmaker in a studio picture. Coogler’s epic dabbles in provocative questions that explore faith, folklore, mysticism and the overall black experience in America, all while belting out some of his most ambitious filmmaking to date.

Courtesy Warner Bros

The structure of the film most closely resembles Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn and even Ernest Dickerson’s Tales From the Crypt: Demon Knight, but those films play as mere inspirations for Coogler’s sweeping canvas. Rodriguez was skilled at holding onto and emphasizing an exchange of dialogue to pull you in, while actually building tension you didn’t realize was being built. Coogler uses this tactic, not just for tension, but for his biggest scares. You can see the different influences from Rodriguez, to the crimson blood squibs and alternate history of Tarantino, to Walter Hill siege films and John Carpenter’s anamorphic horror staging. Some influences are overt, including a funny, subversive homage to the blood testing scene in Carpenter’s The Thing but with garlic clovers. While others are used for jumping off points that allow Coogler to revel in the rich world that he has created.

Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s use of 65mm Imax and Ultra Panavision 70 gives the film a timeless, classical look. The moments that expand to the larger Imax format are used carefully and immerse the audience into the vast scope of the film. There is such soul in every frame, giving weight and heft to the lavish sets and costuming. Some of these images are deeply haunting and simply unforgettable. We see buzzards hovering over the juke joint and other areas of looming death. A piercing image of a couple engulfed together in flames and in the opening, a man stumbling into a stark white church, scarred and covered in blood, gripping the broken neck of a guitar. 

The Creed and Black Panther director understands the many metaphors that exist with vampires, but his take on the creature is more rooted in the fears of Black America and folklore. Coogler’s use of vampire lore effectively intertwines these real fears as Remmick and his two followers show up at the front door of the joint, but cannot enter unless they’re invited in. The audience knows these are blood-suckers literally drooling at the opportunity to turn everyone inside, while the characters are reckoning with letting in three unknown white folks. While Remmick speaks of belief in equality, to Smoke, Stack and the rest of the patrons, it wouldn’t take more than a simple misunderstanding to possibly alert the local dopey Klansmen. Remmick’s growing following of vampires becomes his own Irish folk band that also conjures up spirits through their music.

Coogler, one of only two black filmmakers to make a film to cross over $1 billion, is exploring the many generational crossroads of liberation through storytelling from the black experience. Every one of his characters is holding onto a dream of a better life and this juke joint is an expression of the collective pain and yearning for a hopeful future, a place where they can all escape to drink, dance and “sweat till they stank”. Coogler, himself, feels like he is making his own cinematic juke joint. A place for audiences to escape the horrors of reality with thrilling popcorn entertainment and rich storytelling, all while remembering and attempting to reckon with the past.

Ludwig Göransson’s soulful and innovative score contributes so much to the identity and spirit of Sinners. The two-time Oscar-winning composer’s fusion of blues instruments, hip-hop, classical orchestra and even flourishes of Swedish Death Metal is borderline transcendent at times. Göransson’s expansive arrangement of music shouldn’t work on paper, yet it’s a stunning achievement, nonetheless. It’s also the first score in years to singlehandedly bring tears to my eyes.

There is great care and emotion behind the film, as evidenced by a mid-credits epilogue that is both moving and poetic, even if all ideas or thematic threads don’t fully coalesce. Yet, I’m not sure that it’s all meant to. The path that Coogler puts his characters on is intentionally messy and conflicting. His exploration of morality goes to enough dark corners to not to offer up any definitive answers, but is quite profound in how he explores these areas. 

Courtesy Warner Bros

Sinners is a bold, bloody and magical experience. On face value, Coogler’s film offers endless thrills, but this is an ambitious genre hybrid with real depth and a vibrant sense of place. A singular blend of blues music, genre storytelling and historical fiction, Coogler’s epic is the kind of bold swing that further benefits the rest of modern cinema.

Sinners is now playing in theaters.