It’s early 1930s Jim Crow South and twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) have returned to their poor, small Mississippi town after years away. The brothers’ natty suits, wads of cash, and confident business proposals project what everyone only assumes was great success during their time in Chicago. Now Smoke and Stack want to open a juke joint, a place for the hardworking sharecroppers to blow off steam with booze and dancing… and they promise a wild opening night.
Taking place over roughly 24 hours, Sinners wastes no time setting up: The opening scene has a young man stumbling into a morning church service, clothes shredded and covered in blood, deep claw marks gouging his check. An ensemble of characters is quickly established, including Sammie (or Preacher Boy, as he’s known, played by charming newcomer Miles Caton), the brothers’ young cousin with the blues voice of a man who has sinned many lifetimes; Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, having fun with a sultry character), a local white woman still burning over her romantic past with Stack; Annie (a marvelous Wunmi Mosaku), a traditional healer who shares a past heartbreak with Smoke; and Delta Slim (the always great Delroy Lindo), a bluesman for hire who is more than happy to be paid with booze.
By nightfall, the liquor is flowing and the joint is hopping. People are worked up, sweating, grinding, letting it loose in more ways than one after a long, hot day in the cotton fields. But when a singing trio of white folks, led by toothy charmer Remmick (Jack O’Connell), show ups at the door asking to be invited in to play, something seems off. Then everything starts to go to very, very wrong.
Even though Sinners is full of the expected bloody, juicy vampire violence, it’s an immersively tactile film before the carnage even begins. You can smell the dirt and sweat and sex. The sound thumps and pulses and stomps (the music, much of it composed by Oscar-winner Ludwig Göransson, is truly the star of the film). And at points the veil blurs, opening up visuals of the black experience from long ago to even the future. There’s a musical moment in the middle of the film that is an absolute stunner. The scene so on fire that the building symbolically burns down around the revelers.
Sinners is a wild, genre-stew of a film that almost shouldn’t work, but director Ryan Coogler is such a confident, creative filmmaker that he has created something fresh out of one of the most familiar pop culture monsters. He sticks to the basic rules of the lore, including wooden stakes, bloodsucking, garlic, and the need for an invitation to step over a threshold. But there’s so much more going on here, including an intriguing, not-so-subtle metaphor of black culture being drained and assimilated by the mainstream American experience. This wild, immensely entertaining, original take is easily the best movie I’ve seen come out of Hollywood so far this year.
