Sinners Is a Modern Masterpiece - Reactor

When’s the last time you went to a movie that inspired three separate rounds of applause as it ended?

Allow me to encourage you to see Sinners in the theater, as soon as possible, and see it in IMAX if you possibly can. I don’t normally shill for IMAX, but I think this film needs it just as much as Oppenheimer did, in its own way. Sinners isn’t just a great movie—it’s a gorgeous, difficult experience, and seeing it big surrounded by people on a screen bigger than life will be the best way to feel it, and, really, you need to hear this music. And in the dead center of this, there is a scene that is one of the best things I’ve ever seen in film. I leaned forward when it happened—but more than that I felt like I was being pulled into the movie when it happened.

(It’s also a hell of a way to spend Easter Weekend, if that appeals to you.)

As always I’m going to do my best to avoid spoilers until the end, and I’ll mark them out beforehand.

Sinners is about music. It’s about music’s power to transcend space and time, to hold memory, to carry a culture forward, to set people free, even if only for the length of a song. As the opening narration says: “There are legends of people, with the gift of making music so true it can conjure spirits from the past and the future. This gift can bring fame and fortune, but it also can pierce the veil between life and death.”

And (this isn’t a spoiler if you’ve seen any ads) that’s precisely what happens.

The soundtrack is by Ludwig Göransson, and he brought in singers including Rhiannon Giddens, Rod Wave, Raphael Saadiq, Jerry Cantrell, James Blake, Lars Ulrich, Brittany Howard, and Lola Kirke. The film celebrates Delta blues music, gospel, Irish sean-nós singing, folk music, and even briefly Chinese opera, which probably gives you an idea of the breadth of cultures Coogler and his collaborators bring together.

The year is 1932. The place is Mississippi. Two twin brothers, Smoke (Elijah) and Stack (Elias) Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan), are home from running around underworld Chicago with a lot of money and a truck full of equipment to open a juke joint. For about the first hour of the film, that is the film. The characters don’t know they’re in a hor—

—wait, I’m kidding. The characters are Black and Chinese American, and they live in 1930s Mississippi. Of course they know they’re in a fucking horror movie. It’s just that usually the monsters are white people. One of the many great things about what Coogler does here is that the white monsters only exist at the edge of the frame for a while. There’s the drawling condescending man who sells the brothers the mill that will becomes their juke, and then that’s it. The characters live their lives and do their work ducking around the white gaze as much as they can for that first hour. The brothers split up so one can gather musicians to play that night, while the other goes into town to find people to fix up the mill, cook, and make signs.

The first musician is our actual protagonist, Preacher Boy Sammie Moore (newcomer Miles Caton). His father is a preacher who disapproves of his son making the devil’s music—and this could have been a hoary cliche, except that Coogler has made that belief the dead center of the film. Can music be of the devil? Can it attract evil? Are evil and good real things that exist in this world, or just what people do? If good is as real as evil, can music call that down, too?

Sammy can play a guitar just like ringin’ a bell—or he could, if Chuck Berry’s kind of music wasn’t still 20 years in the future. As it is, he’s a gifted young blues man who hasn’t lived quite enough to be great, but he’ll get there if he gets a chance. He’s joined by Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), who plays for coins on a street corner, and handles the piano at a bar every Saturday, until Stack offers him as much Irish beer as he can drink to come work at the juke that night. Meanwhile Smoke is picking up Bo and Grace (Yao and Li Jun Li), the two Chinese-American shopkeepers who can make the signs and help manage the place.

Smoke and Stack each have to deal with the pasts they left behind, in both cases women who loved them before World War I and Chicago chewed them up and spat them out. Smoke’s partner is Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a root worker who lives deep in the woods, and Stack’s is Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a multiracial woman who could bring a lot of trouble to the brothers because she passes for white. But trouble be damned, everyone ends up at the Juke eventually, which is when the film turns into a brutal riff on a monster movie, with the humans trying to make it through to sunrise while the monsters are singing and jeering outside.

But also it’s much more than that.

As becomes clear, while the mill was bought with money the brother earned and stole and “borrowed” from various nefarious people up North, the juke was built by the community. Those who could came together to clean it, set up furniture, move the piano in and make sure it was tuned, fry up catfish, wash mason jars to serve drinks in, line all the liquor up behind a bar—all the stuff you have to do to open on time and make sure everyone has a good time. And who poured through the doors, dressed to the nines? Mostly people who had been working in cotton fields under the sun all day. Many of them paying with plantation money, wooden coins that didn’t really count as currency anywhere out on the plantation, owned by whichever shitty white person the cotton-picker worked for. The fact that this was a community effort, that these people are exhausted and just trying to have one good night, and that it’s white people and white vampires who are screwing it up is burned into the film stock. The Juke was a sacred space until it was violated. Whatever Sammie’s father thinks, it was holy ground, until it was made unholy.

A few details, without giving you too much:

• This movie is SENSUAL—there is real, complicated, grown-up sex in it, the kind of sex that tells you things about the characters.
• All the women kick ass.
• There is apparently a band of Indigenous vampire hunters? I want a sequel about them.
• When this movie turns into a supernatural horror film it does NOT mess around—I didn’t find the movie “scary” exactly, but there are scenes of such searing emotion that they kept me up last night.
• Ryan Coogler proves that you can still make mid- and end-credits scenes that actually mean something.

I will hazard a guess that this film’s lineage includes the Coen Brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou, Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, Garth Ennis & Steve Dillon’s Preacher comics, and, especially, Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark. Sinners builds on each of these riffs in ways that made giggle with delight.

The cast is uniformly excellent, which becomes clear as the film shifts from being a drama about Black Southern life spiked with comedy and romance, to being a full-on supernatural horror film. Michael B. Jordan is fantastic in his dual role. He doesn’t do anything showy to differentiate the two brothers, who have lived and worked together their whole lives, but he makes them feel different. Their easy intimacy and love for each other is apparent when we first see them sharing a cigarette as they wait for the white man to sell them the mill, and it animates the entire rest of the film, as they face mortal danger once again. Both Mosaku and Steinfeld make make Annie and Mary more than just the women who were left behind. Li Jun Li gets the best line in the film and delivers the hell out of it. But the standout I think is Miles Caton, in his debut. Sammie spends the film learning from his older cousins, figuring out how to talk to women, figuring out how to stand up for himself, but also how to shut up when his input isn’t needed by the adults. Caton calibrates this extremely well, showing us how he’s internalizing and growing over the course of one day and night, until he’s really himself by the end.

The frustrating thing about a movie this good is that in writing about it I feel I’ve flattened it. So I’ll try to sum up: this is a rich, multi-layered experience. I’m white, so I’m assuming there are layers here that are beyond me, but I was fortunate enough to live in the South for a long time, and in a weird way this film made me homesick for the heat and the light and the smell of fields and flowers and bodies baking in the sun. Ryan Coogler takes the vampire genre in a fascinating new direction, and gives us a movie about family bonds that transcends genre. He has once again used a “genre film” to wrestle with this country’s blood-soaked history. And more than all of that he’s made a movie that stops time, that creates a pocket of joy and music that might only last as long as you’re in the theater, but feels like forever while you’re in it.

WARNING: I want to end on something a little spoiler-y, so bow out here if you want to go in completely cold. I have to mention the way this film deal with whiteness as a concept, because it does something really cool.

[Spoilers ahead!]

First, there’s a scene where Delta talks about a lynching. But rather than showing that horror, the film makes us hear it. We hear what the white crowd is doing to Delta’s friend, just as Delta hears it in his nightmares. It’s a brief moment, but I wanted to mention it because I think it’s an extraordinary way to look at horror without flinching, but also without exploiting what was done to the people who have been murdered by white mobs.

The Juke is attacked initially by three white people. One of these is an Irish vampire, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), who has turned a couple who were both in the Klan. Now here’s the thing: being turned has made the couple… good. Or at least better than they were. Because now that they’re supernatural monsters, they believe in love and freedom and “fellowship”—they want the whole world to be part of their vampire family. Their vampirism has cured them of the disease of racism. Which then becomes an open question in the film: submitting to Remmick would give all the Black folks in the film a level of freedom and power that they’ll never experience in the Jim Crow South, or the Jim Crow But They Don’t Call It That North. They’d be “monsters”, and they’d be nocturnal, but they would no longer be subject to the society that has done nothing but crush them.

Should they embrace this shot at a kind of freedom?

But even this is further complicated by Remmick himself, who refers to “the men who took his father’s land” i.e., the British. Remmick himself has lived under colonization. He came to America for freedom, presumably? But now, despite knowing how it feels to have a boot on your neck, when he offers Smoke, Stack, and their family and friends vampirism he isn’t really inviting them, he’s forcing it upon them and feeding off of them just like every other white person they’ve dealt with.

I’m not saying that Ryan Coogler has turned a vampire movie into a big allegory for the history of Black-and-Irish-American relations, but I’m not not saying that, either. The film underlines this complication, of course, in a another music scene. As our protagonists huddle, terrified, in the Juke, Remmick leads all those he’s turned in a joyous sean-nós session outside, singing “Rocky Road to Dublin”. This is theo nly time in the film when people of all races sing and dance together. And in those moments, the vampires don’t sound like monsters at all, they sound like the best party in the world.