While Smoke/Stack are the flashy centers of the film, it is cousin Sammie who is the story’s soul. Also known as Preacher Boy because his father is the pastor for the Black sharecroppers on a nearby plantation, Sammie was raised to play his music for God… but he much prefers the secular blues sound he can dominate at the new juke joint Smoke ‘n Stack are opening up this very night at an abandoned slaughterhouse in the middle of nowhere.
At first it is glorious to hear Caton’s young and already lamentable voice waft through the night air and turn the head of every important local and passerby who doesn’t devote their evenings to Jesus. This includes Smoke’s old flame with strong roots in the superstitions of the Louisiana Bayou, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku); Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao), shrewd Asian American entrepreneurs who own two convenience stores that sell identical products on different sides of the streets, one for the white residents and one for the Black; lovable drunk and longtime blues pioneer Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo); and Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), the white-passing young woman of mixed heritage and even more complex feelings toward Smoke/Stack. There’s also the Devil.
Or at least Jack O’Connell’s Remmick is something close to it when he shows up at the door of the juke joint with a banjo and two camp followers. All toothy grins which can somehow conceal fangs, and eyes that intermittently turn red, one gets the creeping suspicion Remmick is almost as old as the religions Sammie and Annie keep. He also presents an eternally seductive promise: fellowship and bohemia without hatred or division in the ranks among his clan. All you have to do is let him wrap his teeth around your neck.
So Sinners is a vampire movie, and very much of the late night drive-in styling that inspired the similar setup of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996). In its earlier and stronger half, however, it is also a portrait of a time and place of hard lives lived and ruined in an ostensibly beatific land.
Coogler wallows in the seductive evil of his location too. As one of the first filmmakers not named Christopher Nolan allowed to use IMAX cameras on an original story, Coogler basks in shots of Smoke and Stack driving separate open-top cars through rolling green hills peppered with specks of white cotton. To an undiscerning eye, perhaps even Smoke/Stacks’ nostalgic ones, it might look like heaven. But to any viewer, the implication of that cash king crop that led to the enslavement of their ancestors, and the still hardly-better-than-enslavement of good men and women like Sammie’s parents, is implicit.
In a land as deceptively sinister as this, what harm is there in taking control of one’s escape, if even for a couple of hours, with the price being on the contraband booze and getting by a surly bouncer they call Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller)? One senses Jordan’s brothers have done bad things and are probably bad men, but nothing about what they’re offering is evil. It is the always white eyes of those who wish to subsume it that introduce the taste of perversity.
