It’s a film that will haunt me just as much as it will keep me wondering who Ryan Coogler wants to be on the other side of Creed and Black Panther. Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
I have always felt that the South gives America back to itself, ripping illusions from truth. When I see Looney Tunes images of Bugs Bunny sawing off Florida, as if relinquishing land below the Mason-Dixon Line will save our fractured society, my heart breaks. When I read op-eds that suggest Manhattan should be fortified in the face of climate disaster but New Orleans should be consigned to oblivion, I see cowardice in the face of reckoning. The stories we tell about the region, specifically the ones that paint the South as solely a backward territory not worth saving, underscore a basic reality: This is a country built on forgetting. The majority of this country’s Black population is in the South. All this humor and resignation might as well ensure the Black, the brown, the queer, the working class toil under oppressive politicians to death. It certainly complicates the fact that, as poet Eugenia Collier wrote, “It is here that the agony of chattel slavery created the history that has yet to be written. It is the South that has dispersed its culture into the cities of the North. The South is, in a sense, the mythic landscape of Black America.”
With a curiosity that is capacious, Sinners — the 1932-set, southern-bound horror epic from writer-director Ryan Coogler — demonstrates something powerful: a deep reverence for the Black South. Its most beautiful and bracing imagery is that of cotton fields plumbed by sharecroppers, endless skies and dusty roads, the verdant expanse of a land that has witnessed so much sorrow. It opens with an animated segment that bounces through cultures to highlight the esteemed ancestral figures whose artistry pierced the veil between time and space, pausing on West African griots before it lands in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi. It’s the waning days of Prohibition when the infamous twin brothers Smoke and Stack (played with gusto by Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown after cutting it up with Al Capone up North, packing illegal liquor and a firmly held dream to open a juke joint by us, for us. The film takes place primarily over the course of a single day and night, barely touching an encroaching dawn. “I heard they don’t have Jim Crow up there,” Sammie Moore (a sweet-natured Miles Caton), their young cousin with a spiritual talent for the blues, mentions to the twins. But Smoke and Stack respond with expeditious intensity. Chicago is just as racist as the rest of the country, even if its skyscrapers and largess give it a different casing: “We came back home to deal with the devil we know.”
The way the film swims through the contradictions, considerations, and cultural reverie of the rural South is genuinely enlivening. Sinners, festooned with intriguing ideas and even more beguiling characters, grabs the hem of greatness even if it never takes hold, hobbled as it is by a desire to hold more than it can properly contain in its over-two-hour run time, leading to a story that feels misshapen after the setup. Coogler does not rush these proceedings. Instead, he marinates in the happenings and taste of his characters and the world around them after the twins buy a disabused sawmill to operate as a juke joint from a man who is quick to call them “boy” and later proves to be a crucial member of the Ku Klux Klan. Blessedly, a didactic rendition of anti-Black racism does not follow. Coogler trusts his audience, letting the emotional stakes of his movie unfurl slowly. The twins are differentiated by color theory. Smoke in blue, Stack in red. But their differences would be apparent even without that visual cue. Stack is lascivious and abrasive. Jordan carries himself with braggadocio as a man who takes up space unapologetically and never moves quietly in a room, even if he says nary a word. He’s quick to a smile and even quicker to violence. But so is Smoke, though Jordan gives him a taciturn tenderness. He’s bound to Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a hoodoo practitioner with whom he shares a dead child and all the grief therein.
The twins are crucial leads for the film, but Sammie is arguably the true protagonist. It’s his coming of age that provides Sinners its structure — in which he is forced to choose between his gifts as a supernaturally skilled blues musician and the reserved church-bound life his preacher father, Jedidiah (Saul Williams), desires for him. If the fortunes of Sammie, Stack, and Smoke were the only important threads, Sinners would still be an epic, but Coogler isn’t content to rest there. The film plays like it was made by someone who understands they may never be able to commit to such grand cinematic ambitions — or, at least, the resources necessary to make them a reality — again. (The rights to this film revert to Coogler in 25 years, a rarity in the history of Hollywood dealmaking.) There is also Sammie’s love interest, the married singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson). And Delroy Lindo as piano and harmonica blues musician Delta Slim. A drunkard with a golden spirit. Stack’s own ragged love story involves Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, feasting on the opportunity this film provides her), a woman with a half-Black grandfather who lives on the white side of town but prefers to spend time with the Black people she considers kin. One of my favorites of the important supporting cast is the charismatic Chinese couple who runs two shops in town and provides material support to the twins’ efforts to start their juke joint — Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bow Chow (Yao), who have an adolescent daughter, Lisa (Helena Hu). The actors are quickly able to sketch a deep bond between their characters, and their presence is a reminder that the soul of the South may be Black, but it is a region defined by a more complex diversity it rarely gets credit for.
Coogler luxuriates in the lives of these people, and the ecstatic performances they provoke, for about an hour before Jack O’Connell’s vicious Irish vampire, Remmick, cuts a bloodied path through their stories. Sinners is a horror film, stitched together with menacing imagery of sunlight as clear as crystal and blood darker than death. Smoke trails off Remmick’s body as he stumbles to the home of a family affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, just as dawn spills upon the land. He weasels his way into being invited inside, escaping the Native American vampire hunters on his tail. They eventually arrive at the doorstep of the couple, who refuse to trust the words of a group of Indigenous men and therefore guarantee an unsuccessful rescue. (It’s a pity we don’t see more of these characters. It’s such a delicious idea.) Vampires are the best of cinema’s major monsters, and Coogler mostly adheres to legible legends. There’s garlic, silver, stakes to the heart, invitations necessary to darken doorsteps. But he adds a few less common touches that have potential — eyes that glow, an elevated monstrousness that arises as they feed, drooling over the mere thought of blood. (In Sinners, draining a human doesn’t just sate an appetite. A vampire absorbs the memories and skills of their victim, too.) But Remmick’s motivations — explained in a stray line of dialogue — are too thinly drawn and haphazardly framed. (Remmick desires to connect to the ancestors vampirism has barred him from knowing; devouring Sammie’s talent for conjuring spirits of the past through music is the means to doing so. All this is only gestured at.) So is the horror he wreaks. It’s as if the camera flinches. Moments of tragedy and violence are never dwelled upon properly, like Coogler has too much to drink in otherwise to give these moments the time they need. There is no sonic tension; spaces like the juke joint feels visually scattershot and confused once Remmick’s fiery violence crowds the room. Then the emotional beats that mark the conclusions of these characters’ stories arrive without the heft necessary for the losses to bruise. Somehow, I was left wanting more. Certain connective tissue is lost in favor of excess elsewhere.
As much as Sinners succeeds as a celebration of the Black South, it ultimately fails as visceral horror. Yet Coogler’s film is distinct in a way I am curious to see audiences take in. While he fails to make his genre terror visually or narratively gut-wrenching, he avoids blunt messaging about racism and history and sidesteps the most laborious, rote choices of the modern Black horror boom, filled with films that prioritized making racial strife clear to non-Black audiences. Instead, Sinners communicates quite magnificently to Black folks at a register many recent, mainstream Black horror directors before him failed to reach. Coogler’s script is trying to shake the table. He brings up questions about Black people’s misguided adherence to Christianity, who counts as Black and a part of the community, the ancestral reverberations of Black music, finding love against the odds, and the beauty that is born when two distinct bodies become one. These themes make the vampire saga feel rapturous, bold, ambitious, and brimming with curiosity and care. Even with its sloppy flaws, in particular the script’s inability to cohere once the true action is under way, it is a film that got under my skin and continues to haunt my imagination.
And what Coogler accomplishes in the realm of sensuality is genuinely exciting. The characters, save for the young Sammie, feel grown. These are adults with the seasoning that time, heartbreak, and wisdom provide — and which the actors communicate with clear-eyed commitment. There are three sex scenes in the film, including a tender reconnection between Smoke and Annie. But it’s Stack having Mary spit in his mouth during their sex scene in a storage room of the juke joint that stands out for sheer delight. A surprising recurrence in the film is its appreciation of the real eaters out there; at one point, Stack straight-up explains cunnilingus by comparing it to the soft licks of eating ice cream. The film reaches its apex in a vivaciously ambrosial scene in which Sammie flexes dulcet tones and guitar skills, inspiring everyone toward sweat-laced dancing. A West African drummer and dancer appears, an echo from the ancestors of the introduction. A funk guitarist strides next to Sammie. When the hip-hop figures appear, the scene teeters toward being a touch too earnest. But for a moment, this blend of past, present, and future touches transcendence. A cinematic rapture capturing the best staging, framing, and composition of the film. It is a phantasm of Black Southern delights. As Delta Slim tells Sammie, “Blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion.”
