Illustration by Michael DiMilo
Immortal Sins: Movie Review of Sinners
★★★★☆
By Geoff Carter
Movies can be larger than life which is—of course—a great part of their appeal. It always has been. Spectacles like D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance, the 1963 Twentieth Century-Fox version of Cleopatra, or the more recent Babylon, movies featuring “a cast of thousands”, lavish sets, and breath-taking special effects are a major—and decidedly Hollywood-influenced—part of the cinematic experience. Recent (and seemingly endless) epics from the Marvel Universe, Middle-Earth and galaxies far, far ways are the latest examples of grandiose and sometimes (usually) overblown productions.
Films can also be chronicles of internalized–and excruciatingly personal—experience. Gravity, All is Lost, and Moonlight are examples of this sort of film. Some films aspire to the epic while focusing on the intimate reaches of the soul. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is one of the most successful attempts at fusing these two polar opposites and crossing into shadowy borderlands between history, culture, and the self.
Sinners starts with a monologue describing the ways in which music is a gateway between the past, the future, a gateway which bridges the human experience—but one which also attracts evil.
It opens as Sammy (Miles Caton). shocked and bloodstained, enters the church where his father Jedidiah (Saul Williams) is preaching. Sammy clutches the neck of his broken guitar that he will not—even as his father implores him to—release it.
The film flashes back to twenty-four hours before when identical twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan), war veteran who return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, after years of working in the Chicago underworld, planning to open a juke joint for the African community. They purchase an old sawmill from Hogwood (David Maldonado) and recruit Sammy, their nephew, and Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) to play at the joint’s opening that night.
The twins elicit help from Smoke’s estranged wife and local hoodoo practitioner Annie (Wunmi Musaku). Stack reconnects with his old girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who passes as white, and recruits Chinese shopkeepers Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li, respectively) to provide the food. The twins also hire Cornbread (Omar Miller) as the bouncer.
The film then cuts away to Remmick (Jack O’Connell) an Irish immigrant turned vampire, who is being pursued by members of the Choctaw tribe to the home of Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirk), Klan members who he turns into vampires.
Meanwhile, at the opening of the juke joint, Sammy wows everyone with his playing. During a brilliantly surreal sequence, as Sammy plays his guitar, figures from the past and future, including native African musicians, a seventies funk guitar player, and Caribbean players, float in and out of the crowd on the dance floor, underlining Coogler’s point that Sammy’s music is transcendent through time and space. The blues also, as Sammy’s father warned, attracts evil.
As the night wears on, the twins are appalled to see that many of the patrons are paying in “plantation money”, currency created by the owners that is redeemable only by them. Annie persuades Smoke to accept it, saying that the people worked hard for it and that the twins should not—despite the monetary loss—deny them their dignity by pointing out its uselessness.
When Remmick and his vampire entourage appear at the door seeking entrance (because vampires cannot enter a place without an invitation), the twins, suspicious, turn them away, but when Mary points out they need the money, she goes out to talk to them and is subsequently turned into a vampire. She returns to the juke joint, where she subsequently kills Stack by drinking his blood and subsequently escapes. Shocked and appalled at his brother’s death, Stack closes the place early. As they leave, all the patrons are turned. Annie realizes that the invaders are vampires and warns everyone to stay inside, but Bo has already been turned.
He returns with Remmick to seduce Grace into joining him. When she refuses, Remmick, who shares a communal memory with all the vampires, speaks to her in Chinese and threatens her daughter. Remmick tells Stack and his crew that they want Sammy to join them because he has the ability to summon the spirits of his people. He tells them vampirism offers freedom and immortality and warns them the Klan will be attacking the joint at dawn.
When Stack refuses, Remmick leads the vampires in a spooky Irish song and dance, sort of an undead hoedown. Learning that they will be going after her daughter, an enraged Gloria invites them in to fight and a larger-than-life From Dusk to Dawn type battle royale ensues.
Sinners is in many ways a brilliant movie, reminiscent in many ways of Jordan Peele’s manipulations of the horror genre in Get Out! and Us as vehicles to explore the larger issues of racism and white privilege. It is an ambitious film, aspiring to not only depict the Jim Crow South of the Depression, but to use music as a transcendent bridge between reality, history, and desire—the crossroads of sin and morality.
Sinners excels at doing this. Coogler’s careful reconstruction (no pun intended) of Jim Crow Mississippi and the hardscrabble lives of its people is nothing short of brilliant, and his surreal forays into the possibilities of music in both Sammy’s juke joint number and Remmick’s Irish dance are incredibly well-conceived and haunting jaunts into the heart and soul—and raw power—of music.
The writing is nothing short of brilliant. From Sammy’s naïve hopes to the twins’ cynicism to Delta Slim’s bitterness to Annie’s forgiveness, the characters are all meticulously and beautifully drawn, combining to create a moving portrait of a marginalized but resilient community.
But—to me, at least—parts of the film were disjointed and puzzling. I walked in knowing it was billed as a vampire movie but was treated for the first hour to a penetrating social drama. When Remmick and his crew did show up, the plot took a sharp left turn. It was almost as if Sinners had become two separate but not unrelated movies.
The vampire angle raises questions of race (the original undead crew is white), community and freedom (the vampires don’t have to worry about earthly concerns), and solidarity (they all share from the same fount of knowledge), but does not draw these compelling and sometimes fascinating narrative threads together into any kind of coherent message.
Music as sin is another much more clearly communicated point. It is the gateway to pleasure, release, lust, and redemption—the crossroads between sin and salvation, good and evil. When Sammy stands at the metaphoric crossroads at the end of Sinners, his choice as a musician defines his humanity—with all its blemishes.
Sinners is beautifully shot, extremely well-acted, and a wonderfully conceived film that, if anything, reached just a tad beyond its grasp. Like some other recent films, most notably Babylon, in its desire to stretch the envelope, to tell every aspect of its narrative, it loses itself in its own ambition.
See Sinners. It is one-of-a-kind and is, for that reason alone, well worth seeing.