Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the bloodstream, along comes a new horde of vampires, in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” to taint it with yet another metaphysical curse. But Coogler is, by temperament, an analytical filmmaker: his first feature, “Fruitvale Station” (2013), dramatized a factual case of police violence; with “Creed” (a “Rocky” sequel) and the two “Black Panther” films, his artistry advanced as he mined mythologies for their political substance. In “Sinners,” he deploys gory fantasies to undergird his realistic vision. The film’s vampires are essentially metaphors, and the bodies they ravage are, above all, bodies of work and the body politic.
Indeed, until Coogler’s sanguinary predators show up, midway through, “Sinners” plays as a work of minutely observed historical fiction. It’s set in the Black community in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the course of the day and night of October 15-16, 1932—which is to say that it’s a historical horror film, because its reality is scarred by the horrors of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. The drama starts with a young man named Sammie (Miles Caton) driving up to a church and stumbling into a Sunday-morning service led by his father (Saul Williams); Sammie’s face is bloodied and gashed, and he’s holding a snapped-off guitar neck. Thus, from the start, Coogler brings together music and horror. From there, after a title card announces “One day earlier,” the movie unfolds as a flashback, filling in the events leading up to Sammie’s agony.
The story centers on the return to Clarksdale of long-absent twin brothers, Elijah and Elias Moore, called Smoke and Stack, respectively—both played by Michael B. Jordan. They fought in the First World War, then moved to Chicago and got involved with gangsters; now they’re back with money and a plan. They buy a vacant mill from a jovially menacing white man named Hogwood (David Maldonado), where they plan to open a juke joint that very night; they recruit Sammie, a precociously talented blues singer and slide guitarist who’s also their cousin, to play there. Sammie’s father disapproves of his performing for “drunkards” and warns, “You keep dealing with the Devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.”
Although “Sinners” takes a while to turn fantastical, it rests on myth throughout. Clarksdale, after all, calls itself the birthplace of the blues and is also the site of the crossroads where, around 1930, Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for supreme guitar artistry. Coogler builds musical mythology into a tensely realistic drama, zooming in on backstories—personal and political—that emerge in action. While Smoke heads to town to buy provisions for the club, Stack and Sammie hire another musician, the elderly Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), who has been playing harmonica for coins at the train station. There are quick but indelible glimpses of signs for the whites-only ticket booth, waiting room, and rest room; when Stack, seeing a white woman nearby, orders Sammie to avert his eyes and walk away, the screen shivers with the ambient terror underlying the banalities of segregation.
Driving back from the station, the three men pass Black chain-gang prisoners doing hard labor at the roadside, and Slim talks about a time when he and a musical partner, after a trumped-up arrest, ended up at a white man’s home to entertain his guests. “See, white folks, they like the blues just fine,” he says. “They just don’t like the people who make it.” He adds that, soon thereafter, his partner was stopped by Klansmen, falsely accused of rape, and lynched. At the end of that story, Slim, mournfully and bitterly, starts to hum, then to sing, and implores Sammie to join in—a symbol and a reminder of the birth of the blues.
On the film’s way to its vampiric turning point, it develops a richly delineated dramatic ethnography of Black life in the age of Jim Crow. Coogler invests daily activity with ample detail, even paying close attention to money matters. It’s a pet peeve of mine that movies often show characters doing business—going shopping, taking jobs—without specifying prices or wages, but Coogler writes “Sinners” in dollars and cents, and locates the history behind the figures: one customer at the brothers’ night spot, Club Juke, a plantation laborer who has only thirty cents for his fifty-cent shot of corn liquor, offers to pay the rest in plantation scrip. Coogler also keeps a keen eye on the region’s ethnic mix, foregrounding Choctaw residents and a couple of Chinese descent, Bo (Yao) and Grace (Li Jun Li), who run a grocery. Moreover, the reunions sparked by the brothers’ return prove as sociologically significant as they are dramatically crucial. The white woman (Hailee Steinfeld) at the train station is actually a mixed-race woman passing, and her background—along with the dangerous deceit of her daily life—is itself a chapter of history. So is Smoke’s relationship with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a hoodoo healer, which reaches deep into their shared past and evokes the spiritual dimensions of tradition.
Here’s what “Sinners” isn’t: a story of a musician selling his soul to the Devil. It’s clear from the outset that Coogler’s view of myth is sharply revisionist; the movie opens with a voice-over monologue about musicians with seemingly supernatural talent, known by various terms in various cultures—including, in West African ones, as griots—whose art “can bring healing to the community but it also attracts evil.” In other words, evil isn’t in the music but comes from the outside and finds the music. The movie’s pivot to vampires is a supernatural vision of the real-life snares set for great Black musicians. Coogler transforms the faux-Faustian blues legend into an allegory of historical horror.
The diabolical metaphysics of Coogler’s Clarksdale blues are centered not on the creation of music but on its dissemination—on the fate of a community-based creator in society at large. The movie’s leading vampire, named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), is also a musician—a white cultural appropriator who schemes, with soft words and sharp teeth, to get hold of the music played by Sammie, Slim, and other Black musicians in their circle. He wants their songs and their stories, he says—but, of course, he has nothing of the experience or the history that gave rise to them. “Sinners” features only two kinds of white people—Hogwood and his crew of violent racists, and Remmick and his cohort, whose violence is hidden under the guise of love. The vampires present themselves as warmhearted integrationists, but their egalitarian welcome comes at the price of their victims’ souls—even while bestowing on them the ironic gift of immortality (of the literal sort). Their bites turn Black victims into vampires who willingly integrate—and who turn into similarly smiling predators all too comfortable with their new, culturally homogenized surroundings, as if suggesting a metaphysical form of the pitfalls awaiting artists whose parasitic acolytes lead them to the blandishments of crossover.
Coogler presents a provocatively Africanist view of Black American experience, and does so with exuberant inventiveness; the uncompromising political essence of his allegorical vision is expressed with aesthetic delight. The pistol-packing, battle-hardened Smoke and Stack are sinners, too—but ones who know who they are, where they came from, and what they’re fighting for. Smoke disabuses Sammie of halcyon ideas about freedom up North: “Chicago ain’t shit but Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations.” The brothers, having both military and criminal experience (not to mention their Chicago armamentarium), confront white racists with startling boldness, openly threatening Hogwood. Jordan brings them both to distinctive life with his powerful presence and a virtuosity that wears its effort lightly. The entire cast carries the action with fierce, pressurized commitment and delivers the characters’ lofty thoughts and sharp-edged talk forthrightly; their performances feel conjured, not acted. Caton, a deep-voiced singer with no prior screen credits, endows Sammie with a preternatural sense of purpose and poise; it’s an extraordinary début.
To stage Jordan’s dual role, for which both brothers are often together in the same frame, Coogler, relying on elaborate technology, displays a modest yet astounding craft. Perhaps his two spectacular and effects-driven movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe helped him to cultivate a feel for complex methods that, here, don’t replace reality but expand it. Although Coogler’s film encompasses legend and mysticism, his manner is rationally extravagant; the action, even at its most fantastical, is underpinned by audacious ideas. The enormous scope of “Sinners” provides a grand canvas for some thrilling set pieces, deftly realized by the cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, including a floridly choreographed dance-floor scene that links Club Juke’s homegrown blues to other cultures and other times; an apocalyptically metaphysical conflagration; and a wild shoot-out that breaks its action for a glimpse into the beyond. (Also, as a Marvel veteran, Coogler teases that franchise’s conventions to look beyond the beyond: stick around for his mid-credits and post-credits scenes.) ♦
