“That’s why we came back home. Figured we might as well deal with the devil we know.”
Weird connection: perennially underrated rock band Switchfoot released a single earlier this year with blues icon Buddy Guy called ‘Last Man Standing’. A few months later, I’m watching Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a bold blockbuster hybrid of vampire bloodbath, body horror, old-timey musical, and period piece, and who shows up but the blues legend himself. It’s a short cameo right at the end; Guy plays an older version of one of the characters from the main story in a however-many-years-later epilogue, but it brought a smile to my face and solidified my opinion that this crazed genre movie exceeded my expectations.
It seems apt to begin a discussion on the film with its musical roots, because, as is so often not the case, Sinners actually fulfills its pretentious claims about the power of music. An early voiceover tells us that a select few have the innate talent to make music that can raise the dead or see into the future. Throughout the course of the film we see it happen, and the diegetic music within the film actually mostly lives up to that lofty idea and stirs the viewer and the characters alike. There’s a particular scene that everyone highlights that swirls all sorts of styles together and becomes unmoored from time and space and the laws of physics that is simultaneously super cool and a little bit corny.
I don’t believe that music can raise the dead or whatever, but I’ve had my share of blissful, communal concert experiences as well as many private moments overcome by the power of one particular recording or another and Sinners does as good a job as any film at illustrating how good music can be a powerful center of gravity that momentarily lifts us out of our mundane reality. Much credit is due to Ludwig Göransson, Coogler’s USC classmate, whose eclectic stylings all feel like legitimate expressions of distinct genres in isolation but also blend wonderfully into Coogler’s expansive soup of eras and fads. I would argue there’s only about 30 seconds that sound like music from the 1930s—they had recording equipment back then!—but this is only detrimental to the film when its modern musical forays very occasionally sound inauthentic. Note that I may be overrating the music a skosh because it is diegetic and touches on many styles that I enjoy and is so prominent in a handful of scenes.
Michael B. Jordan has starred in every single one of Coogler’s feature films to date. Coogler apparently enjoys the partnership so much that he wrote a screenplay with two roles for the actor. Rebel twin brothers Smoke and Stack, veterans of WWI and former members of Al Capone’s Chicago mafia, return to their hometown in Mississippi, a land overrun by cotton fields and the Ku Klux Klan. They purchase an old saw mill, and, over the course of a single day and night, renovate the building, hire cooks and musicians and doormen, and host the grand opening of their very own juke joint. It helps that their little cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) is a blues prodigy, and also that the blues lifer Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) can be bribed with exotic beer to ditch his regular gig for the night.
The brothers understandably think that the biggest threat to their enterprise is the Klan, but about halfway through, just as the music starts to overcome all the patrons stomping and clapping and humming along and disc jockeys and rappers and ancient bluesmen and African tribesmen and breakdancers and P-Funk-esque guitarists start to materialize in the 1930s and the old mill starts to burn to the ground from the power of music (the aforementioned scene everyone loves), the film takes a turn into supernatural horror as folk-singing vampires try to crash the juke joint and turn everyone into free love immortals.
What’s unique about these vampires in the vast tradition is that they’re basically sincere. You think these white folks in the Jim Crow era are just going to be racists, but they’re not. You think their claims of fellowship and love are a mockery of Christianity, but they’re not. In fact, when one of the characters honors a pact and drives a stake through the heart of another before they can turn, the vampires are overcome with grief. Whatever they are, whatever they believe in, they actually want to share their lives with these people. It’s just that first they must violently eat their flesh. Many reviews I’ve seen quote the Irish vampire’s line, “I want your stories and I want your songs,” as a clear metaphor for cultural appropriation, but his very next line is, “And you’re going to have mine.” Which speaks more to a joyful sharing of cultural heritage than appropriation, albeit within this monster movie context where the sharing isn’t just sitting around the campfire and passing the guitar around.
It’s very audacious and loose-limbed, not to mention super horny, taking wild stabs at serious themes (race, justice, sexuality, religion, repression, redemption) but jamming them all into a supremely entertaining vampire movie liberally sprinkled with performances of blues and folk music. It’s an unexpected formula and one that could easily have felt gimcrack or self-conscious, but, since Coogler’s been successful with his mainstream efforts (Creed, Black Panther), he was able to put $100M into this outré vision and do it without the winky cynicism apparent in so many films from this era of cinema that would be considered similar to this one. Indeed, the subject matter of Sinners can be considered dark, but it’s the same raw material that’s been fashioned into many schlocky B movies that are not sinister at all, and the consistent objective of Coogler’s film is to build itself up to the most joyful cinematic expression of its premise as possible. And so we get a wizened harmonica player slicing his arm with a broken bottle to lure vampires with his spurting blood, and a blues player smashing another one’s head with his guitar. It’s gleeful schlock but it takes itself seriously as art.
Jordan is solid in the dual leading role, although he struggles along with the script to distinguish the two characters, but the supporting cast are just as crucial: Wunmi Mosaku as a former lover of one of the brothers who’s dabbled in hoodoo; Hailee Steinfeld as the other brother’s “passing” childhood sweetheart; Jack O’Connell as an Irish immigrant who plays lovely folk music and happens to commence the evening of bloodsucking; Omar Miller as a gargantuan bouncer; Jayme Lawson as a capable crooner and the object of young Sammie’s affections; Li Jun Li and Yao as Chinese-American grocers living out the American Dream; all of them sharing tangled personal and cultural histories.
Sinners sacrifices nuance in favor of loud, gross spectacle, but it is so thorough in laying its narrative groundwork and period ambiance that it doesn’t falter when it gets loosened up and starts taking big swings. It doesn’t always land its haymakers, mind you, but it’s a super fun genre romp that caught me pleasantly off guard with its combo of folk horror, period detail, and blockbuster swagger. Acknowledging the work of Nolan, Shyamalan, Tarantino, Peele, and a few others, we simply don’t get nearly enough original big-budget genre films of this vintage and personality.
It’s neat that one of the main messages of the film is to recognize and cherish the good times as they’re happening. Sometimes I fret over what to watch or save specific movies that are renowned because I want to make sure I’m in the mood to have some sort of experience with them. But then I tossed on Sinners without much expectation for a moving experience but quickly found myself embracing it.