Ryan Coogler’s extraordinary horror entertainment Sinners opens with a sequence that hits like one of those question-mark blues chords, a what-the-hell-is-happening? clang that might be setting you up for despair or elation or both. The morning light around him looking weirdly malevolent, a young man stumbles to the door of a small country church, swinging the remains of a guitar in one hand. It’s just a ghost of a thing, really: all that’s left of the instrument is the neck, a jagged stick with a few busted strings sprouting from bloody tuning pegs, as if it has literally been played to death—or used as a murder weapon. The man’s cheek bears a set of still-bleeding claw marks, definitive as guitar frets. When he yanks that church door open, the preacher—we later learn it’s his own father—embraces him, relieved that this young man has returned to the fold, having slipped the clutches of whatever godforsaken evil had taken a hold of him. The young man’s trial is over. Or maybe it’s just beginning. The end of Sinners—or, more accurately, one of its two nested endings, one of which lands after the credits—will tell you which. And even then, you’re left with the feeling of not having gotten the whole story, as if it’s continuing to spin out somewhere beyond the movie screen.
What makes Sinners, set in 1932 Clarksdale Mississippi, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain. Coogler, who also wrote the script, sees how the present becomes the future in the blink of an eye, but also how the past, even as it may seem to shrink in the distance, never fully disappears. Sinners is about vampires, perpetual outsiders who desperately yearn to belong, but whose silky promises are rooted in treachery. Mostly, though, Sinners is alive to the mystery of music: the way, for centuries, white people and Black people seemed to hear and feel music differently, until somehow the sounds they were hearing, and making, merged and blurred into a kind of aural futureworld, one that’s still unfolding today. Sinners is gory, seductive, pitiless. But there’s also something wistful about it, as if its characters had glimpsed a possibility of freedom, unity, and happiness that, nearly 100 years later, is still out of reach.
Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, returning to their Mississippi Delta hometown after surviving the battlefields of World War I and a stint in Chicago that may have been almost as bloody. They’ve got great clothes—ace costume designer Ruth E. Carter has outfitted them in dapper woolen suits, complete with waistcoats and gold watch chains—and a case full of money, and the first order of the day is to buy the ramshackle house where they hope to open a juke joint that very evening. (It’s sold them by a sleazy, wheezy, clearly racist local, Hogwood, played by David Maldonado.) Smoke and Stack have hidden a truckful of booze near town, and they enlist old friends to help them get their party started: Husband and wife Bo and Grace Chow (played by Yao and Li Jun Li), Chinese immigrants who run the local general store, make signs for the place and provide the basic ingredients for the victuals. For the entertainment, Smoke and Stack recruit a fine blues pianist and harmonica player fallen on hard times, Delta Slim (a quietly marvelous Delroy Lindo). And they’ve got a fresh new face, too: Sammie (Miles Caton, terrific in his film debut), the twins’ cousin and the young man we meet in the movie’s first scene, is a guitar prodigy ready to bust out. His father, the church pastor, wants him to devote both his life and his music to God, but Sammie’s not ready to commit. There’s too much music in him. At the start of the film, an alluring voiceover warns us that some people have the gift of making music “so true it can conjure spirits from the past and the future,” though it can also “pierce the veil between life and death.” Sammie is eager for all of it, and the world seems to split wide open as he plucks the strings of his guitar, spinning out phrases that speak of things beyond words, the feel of skin on skin, the whispered secret of furtive, urgent kisses, the first bite of a biscuit smeared with honey. It’s music that could charm the devil.
While they’re in town, Smoke and Stack talk up their opening night, and sure enough, later that evening, everybody shows up. The place is a hit, though amid the music and revelry and sweaty bumping and grinding, Smoke and Stack have their hands full, making sure, for instance, that their patrons don’t try to pay for their drinks with wooden nickels. There’s one guest Stack would rather not see, Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary, an old friend in town for her mother’s funeral. Stack and Mary have a complex history together; their fates will become further entwined by the end of the night. And Smoke has sought out both the protection and the sublime cooking of a woman named Annie (the superb Wunmi Mosaku), a hoodoo practitioner who also knows how to serve up catfish for a huge crowd. She and Smoke also have a complex history, one whose nuances come to light in the movie’s half-violent, half-poetic ending.
The most raucous parties are always the ones most likely to attract gate crashers, and Smoke, Stack, and Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), the jovial, muscular sharecropper they’ve enlisted as doorman and bouncer, are both bemused and cautious when three hillbilly outsiders, white people toting fiddles and false promises, show up at the door, hoping to charm their way into the party. They’re musicians, they explain, and they love the sounds they’re hearing from Smoke and Stack’s little barrelhouse. To prove their sincerity, they play a song themselves, an old folk tune that could be about gambling, or about sating your hunger by sucking on the bones of tiny birds, or about any number of simple or sinister things. The song is “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” and this trio of musicians have borrowed it from the women who most famously sang it, Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas, and made it sound square and white and queasily creepy. Smoke, Stack, and the other patrons of the club stand in the doorway, staring dubiously at these three cracker outliers. They seem OK—maybe. Should they be invited in?
You of course already know the answer to that. The three strangers, Remmick, Joan, and Bert—played by Jack O’Connell, Lola Kirke, and Peter Dreimanis—have come to the door literally looking for blood, and they’ll get it. Coogler has already made a number of smart, elegantly crafted movies—Fruitvale Station, Black Panther, Creed—and Sinners, its storytelling both economical and fluid, continues and enhances that stretch. Coogler stages two glorious set pieces: In one of them, Sammie’s playing, fulfilling the dangerous and wondrous promise of that early voiceover, conjures spirits from both the past and future—they include West African griots in patterned robes, elegant Chinese dancers twirling in vivid silk, ’80s breakdance kids and ’90s rappers, and a Bootsy Collins-style funk god in sequins and platforms. In another sequence, an unnervingly exhilarating one, Black and white folk join in an unholy outdoor vampire dance, united by one forbidden desire and finding the same groove in the traditional Irish ballad “Wild Mountain Thyme.” It’s white hillbilly music for sure, yet it bleeds into the blues: in the 1930s, these two modes of music just couldn’t get it together, yet there was something in each that was reaching out toward the other. (No wonder Elvis had to happen.)
I watched half of Sinners through splayed fingers and the other half with my jaw hanging open. It’s fun and rowdy and suitably lurid. And although it’s sometimes gory, Coogler suggests more than he actually shows. He has cited Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Til Dawn and The Faculty as influences, though in its pulpy, elegiac lyricism Sinners also nods to Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 Near Dark, in which a family of redneck modern-day vampires wheel through Oklahoma in a van with blacked-out windows. And at the risk of giving too much away, I urge you to stay through the closing credits, unless you want to miss the appearance of blues king Buddy Guy—and you don’t.
The key is to Sinners is that Coogler folds his ideas into the story subtly, rather than spelling them out Bible-pamphlet style. And though the movie takes place in the Jim Crow south, a place where Black Americans had to fight for their dignity, only to be kicked down again and again, its view of racial tensions—and, maybe someday, racial unity—is layered and complex. When Remmick, Bert, and Judy show up at the club’s door, discreetly hiding their vampire nature, they dangle a dream before Smoke, Stack, and all their friends and patrons. Remmick gazes at them earnestly and speaks from his heart, or what passes for it. “We believe in music and equality,” he tells them, his Irish-blarney eyes barely blinking. “Can’t we, just for one night, all be family?” The key to the scene is not that Smoke and Stack and Sammie and their friends, clustered near the door to see what these three white strangers have to say, stare at Remmick knowing they can’t believe in his invitation to unity and fellowship. It’s that they can’t hide how much they want to believe him. Sinners is about all that connects us rather than what divides us. Sometimes we find that communion in music, in dancing, in talking and laughing with one another. Our tragedy is that even then, somehow we forget that we all bleed red.
