Review: ‘Sinners’ Is An Indulgent Delight

Ryan Coogler cashed in all of his “One for them/One for me” franchise credits (Black Panther, Creed) for Sinners, and the result is an overstuffed and indulgent feast I’m still chewing on. The marketing math of double Michael B. Jordan plus vampires doesn’t begin to cover the scope of this thing. Heck, the vampires don’t even make an appearance until an hour into the two-plus hour runtime — and somehow you don’t even miss them. It’s a messy, flawed movie, but it’s the ambition, the big ideas behind those flaws that bring Sinners close to genuine greatness.

Or at least that’s how I’ve reconciled it after a few days of mulling it over. The film, which is mostly told across a single 24-hour period in 1932, is bifurcated between a day story and a night story. During the day, twin bootleggers named Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown in the Mississippi Delta to set up a juke joint. They purchase an old sawmill from a good ol’ boy who may or may not be a Klansman, then set about transforming it into a den of booze, cards, and most importantly, the blues. With the grand opening set for that night, the pair split up to acquire the supplies and staff they need for the club - and reacquaint themselves with old friends and flames along the way. The story of where the twins were and why they’re back, even who they are, unfolds piecemeal as they encounter their crew. If the movie is sometimes too on-the-nose in its messaging, it remains confident enough to allow us to discover the twins through these interactions. Smoke is the no-nonsense businessman, all hard truths and clear vision, while Stack is the people-pleaser, with charisma to spare and easy lies on the tongue.

The film luxuriates in character introductions, establishing a broad bench of figures we’ll follow throughout the day, and the cast is in top form. There’s Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a drunk piano player wooed to abandon his steady gig for the twins’ new venture with the promise of unlimited Irish beer. Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo Chow (Yao), the Chinese grocers, hop aboard to supply food and extra hands. Smoke pulls Annie (Wumni Musaku), a hoodoo mystic and his former love, to fry the catfish, though their long history is rivalled by the appearance of Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a part-Black woman passing for white who grew up with the twins and immediately clashes with Stack. Then there’s Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton), the twins’ cousin and the stealth main character, a young sharecropper with a pastor father and a fierce talent on the steel guitar.

As the sun begins to set and the doors open to welcome a stream of plantation workers looking to unwind, the action finally hits the ground running… literally. A white man, smoke pouring off his skin in the last rays of light, rushes for shelter at a lone house. He begs for entry, claiming he’s being pursued by a band of Choctaw, and though the owners are suspicious, they allow him in. The Choctaw arrive shortly after, with a dire warning about the stranger that falls on deaf ears, then they leave before it’s full dark. It’s already too late, anyway. Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish vampire, claims his first victims, turning them easily with a bite.

A voiceover at the start of the film offers up a myth about musicians with a gift so strong their songs can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future, and a stand-out musical sequence at the club reveals Sammie is just such a talent. As he plays, the camera moves through the sweating, dancing bodies of the club to find unexpected figments have joined the revelry. A rock guitarist, a DJ, and so many dancers - tribal, ballet, hip hop. The veil isn’t just pierced, it’s burning down around them, as if the music Sammie unleashes is a bonfire. One that draws the attention of the vampires.

It can feel disjointed, this sudden turn to horror, and challenging to reconcile with the many, many themes at play in Sinners. But when these literal white devils arrive on the club’s doorstep offering a kumbaya existence of fellowship and equality, the choice to add vampires to this epic comes into focus. Coogler is strategic in his vision of vampires, embracing some old rules (garlic, invitations for entry) and abandoning others. Religion, especially Christianity, offers no protection for good reason. When has it ever protected the colonized? Annie’s mojo bags have more juice than Christ. His main addition to the mechanics of vampirism is that, once turned, the monsters form a sort of collective, sharing memories and knowledge. Here, equality and power are forged by erasing the differences between us and conforming to a new order. In a movie pointedly populated by the displaced and the dispossessed - Black, Chinese, Irish, Indigenous - it’s an eerily sinister bargain, offered with the violence of a peaceful smile.

The back half of the movie is familiar, a steady whittling down of the characters we love as they recognize the danger on their doorstep and take their last stand. What’s unusual is how rapidly they die, sometimes turned off-screen only to reappear in the growing crowd of vampires performing an unlikely Riverdance outside the club, and the action barely pauses to mark their passing. Then again, why linger? Death is inevitable, the movie seems to argue. It’s common. If there weren’t vampires, then there’d be Klan members at the door. That long, slow first act as we got to know these people’s lives? That was what mattered. As one of the two end-credit sequences makes explicit, beauty and tragedy don’t cancel each other out. The best day of your life can end in tragedy, and still be the best day of your life. That’s the blues, baby.

There are a few distinct endings offered in Sinners, as if Coogler couldn’t decide when to let the curtain close, and even that feels like an earned indulgence. He had final cut of the film, after all! It was part of the powerful deal he negotiated with Warner Bros, which also includes first-dollar gross points (he gets a cut of the profits before the studio recoups its expenses), and rights to the movie itself will revert back to him after 25 years. That’s a nigh-unheard-of contract - one that he claims he won’t seek again, even if Hollywood insiders are freaking out about the destruction of the studio system at large. For Coogler, it was important that a movie about Black ownership itself be under Black ownership, and even here we see his themes crystallizing yet again. Freedom and power, power and freedom. Whatever else you may think Sinners is about, it’s a testament to Coogler’s industry power and the freedom that affords him.