Sinners review
Director: Ryan Coogler
Writers: Ryan Coogler
Stars: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell, and Delroy Lindo.
Running Time: 138 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
In this hot, passionate, musically explosive exploit of race, horror, violence and art, Ryan Coogler has elevated his career onto a new level of cinematic expression. Sinners is many things, but above all, it is a hopped-up amalgamation of genre, music, prestige and swagger, each element so full of vitality and tied together so ruthlessly, the effect is one of awe and adrenaline. For over two hours, Coogler transfixes us, hypnotises us with the exuberant energy of black culture under fire from the social forces of Jim Crow-era Mississippi and the insatiable blood lust of vampires. It’s an audacious mix, one that in the hands of a lessor talent would drown under it’s own ambition.
As customary with Coogler, he requisites the same lead actor that so far populates his entire filmography, this time playing duel roles. The insistently captivating and effortlessly natural Michael B. Jordan plays identical twin brothers Smoke and Stack, two slick yet weathered gangsters, both fresh from robbing Al Capone and his enemies in 1930s Chicago. Their community in the Mississippi Delta are surprised to see them home but are taken by the excitement of them opening a jukebar in a recently purchased warehouse. In a patient first hour, we’re treated to the lengthy exposition of Smoke and Stack’s talents – their authorial and confident ability to be persuasive via both the tongue and the gun. In a way they almost too tightly fit the mold of the perfectly cool anti-hero, but delightfully Jordan and Coogler manage to find humanity to ground them in small doses. Their relationships with the women in their lives, the women they’ve left behind, is nuanced enough for Jordan to break out beyond the confines of each character’s archetype.
“Explicit history requires an explicit message.”
And for Coogler, playing with archetypes is part of the film’s sense of fun. There is the alcoholic blues musician (Delroy Lindo), there’s the young blues guitar prodigy (Miles Canton), there’s the mixed race Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), and the jovial, overweight Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), each of them seemingly fitting the neat archetype of other stories but all entertainingly grounded to maintain their sincerity. Hiring Delroy Lindo to play an alcoholic blues musician instantly delivers such an unbelievably fun-laden performance, so full of wit and experience, you’ll find yourself begging his character to survive the horrific proceedings. Once the party gets started and the blues guitars start firing, the collision of electric characters is a delight, all of them strong-minded across the gender line, and each of them delivering some of the best directed, laser sharp dialogue you’ll hear in a theater this year. Sex and death are both vampire-movie essentials, and in this extended set up, music is added to the excessively fun carnage.
In a virtuoso set-piece, young and baritoned Miles Canton sings the crowd into musical number that pushes us beyond the boundaries of the 1930s – an arching, craning one-shot takes us high above the party to witness a musical blend of Jim Hendrix era electric guitar, African tribal drums, Asian dance, DJ vinyl scratching, and more in a joyous fusion of black musical history, all of it blended and mixed into a euphoric social exploration of marginalized community. It’s the kind of sequence too often the ambition of would be neutered by lack of resources, but thankfully there’s still some artistic integrity left in the Hollywood system to give Coogler’s vision space to shine, and it hardly shines better than this.
By the last hour, the violent consequences of being in a vampire movie make themselves known. There is indeed more than a tinge of Dusk till Dawn in the proceedings, especially in the extended set up and the fatalistic last act, but Sinners manages to maintain a certain literary smartness to its mayhem that the former failed at. By keeping the characters safely indoors and by setting up the rule of the vampires needing to be invited inside, it gives breathing space for our heroes to negotiate the nature of their dreadful circumstances. Even John Carpenter’s The Thing gets a homage in each character being forced to eat cloves of garlic to ensure the group hasn’t been secretly infiltrated. With these playful moments of convention, Coogler still manages to keep the material fresh because the character’s remain smart, independent and likeable. It’s a relief to see them make understandable choices under fire.
And in death the consequences are genuinely felt by those still living. Sinners contains both racism in metaphor (vampires) and racism literally (Klan), and by having both, the very unsubtle horror of racial trauma is delivered in appropriately unsubtle ways. Explicit history requires an explicit message. The thematic heart of Sinners is very much worn on its sleeve, the violent end being both used as exciting cinematic fare and as a blood-pumping treatise of historical significance. By mixing the picking of cotton fields with the rattle of popcorn horror, we can be reminded that art can rewrite history as an act of cultural therapy, by acknowledging the truth and writing it as catharsis. For any indulgence taken advance of, Sinners won’t give up providing both.
