Ryan Coogler's Sinners is a Southern Gothic fable that combines music, history, religion, and horror: building into an imaginative, cinematic eruption. Set in 1932 in rural Mississippi, the film follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) who return to their home of Clarksdale to establish a Juke Joint for the local Black community. Little do they know sinister forces are gathering.
During the era of Jim Crow legislation, economic depression, sharecropping, bootlegging, lynching, and post-slavery exploitation: Coogler's ensemble, screenplay, and direction encapsulates a bold and transcendent masterpiece. Pertinently set during the post-reconstruction era of the American South – the cotton fields were an economic grid where the tenants (predominantly Black) were in a cycle of debt, perpetually shackling them to land they cannot call their own. Sinners sings, bites, seduces, and rouses a rhythmic rebellion.
Smoke and Stack were World War I veterans who went on to become gangsters for the Chicago Outfit. As sinners who have abandoned their church run by their Uncle Jedidiah (Saul Williams), they believe in forging a future using self-determination instead of faith. Having stolen from the mob, they buy an old sawmill from shady boss, Hogwood (David Maldonado) to grant their people a needed (and, in Smoke's estimation, economically prosperous) reprieve from the cotton fields. They say they will shoot any Klan member who steps foot in the joint, which Hogwood rebuts with the assurance that the "Klan don't exist no more".
Smoke, who is resourceful, methodical and business minded, encourages a slower pace at bringing their plans to fruition. Stack, being the more spontaneous and impulsive of the pair, urges and convinces Smoke to open the club that night. Helping them out is their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton in a scene-stealing debut role), son of Jedidiah. Sammie is a prodigiously talented Blues musician, but his father believes it betrays the church and invites a link to the devil. Smoke also thinks his cousin, the 'preacher boy,' belongs away from the volatile life of he and his brother.
The character of Sammie is inspired by the myth of Robert Johnson, the Blues musician and songwriter who became synonymous with making 'deals with the devil' to sell his soul and achieve musical success. Coogler’s script also pays a debt to Charlie Patton, Son House, and all others who laid the foundation for Delta Blues. Sammie's resources, oppression, and ability are all a part, but not entirely defined, by the art in which he is expressing himself. The very existence of Blues music was power, and Sammie's battle to either forge his path or follow his family is the most enriching hook in the film.
While Smoke heads to town, Stack and Sammie go to the train station to entice piano and jaw harp player Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) with as much Irish beer as he can drink. Here, Sammie meets the alluring Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married woman and singer to whom Sammie instantly takes a shine. Through honouring but not exploiting the harsh history of the Mississippi, Coogler uses a non-diegetic soundscape to recount Slim's horrific memory of his buddy Rice's unjustified lynching. Hearing the lynching is a haunting and respectful substitute to seeing it.
Stack also reunites with his ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a determined but grief-stricken woman who has just lost her mother. To Stack, he will always love her but believes her white passing presentation offers her greater opportunity. She uses humour, expletives, and pithy comments to show frustration at Stack's refusal to keep her in his world. Due to the anti-miscegenation laws of the Jim Crow South, a romantic relationship between them would be illegal. Mary's perseverance won't stop her from going to the club that night and pursuing a community she feels she belongs in.
In a wooden dwelling away from the church and cotton fields, Smoke visits his estranged wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku). She is a hoodoo root-worker and healer. Through her conjure, she believes she kept the twins safe as both soldiers and mobsters. Smoke wants her to act as cook for the produce obtained from friends and shop owners Grace and Bo (Li Jun Li and Yao), Chinese immigrants running multiple businesses in town. Mosaku beautifully plays a woman whose resilience, spiritual practice, and emotional maturity reckons with the losses of her past. Any other screenplay would keep Mary and Annie as one-dimensional love interests, but Coogler breathes life, purpose and conviction into these women's very complicated lives.
All seems to be going to plan for the joint’s grand opening. On the door is comic relief field worker turned bouncer Cornbread (Omar Miller). Attempting to create a union between himself and the Juke Joint revellers is the volatile Remmick (Jack O'Connell). Earlier that day, fleeing from (criminally underused) Choctaw vampire hunters, the centuries-old Irish vampire sought refuge in the home of two married Klansmen, whom he immediately turned into his vampiric disciples. As the film turns from a drama to a horror, Coogler takes all the tropes of vampire lore: stakes to the heart, garlic and silver, the threat of sunlight, remixing them into a stunning battle of originality, humour, and pathos.
Ludwig Göransson outdoes himself with his score for Sinners. Recorded using the same guitar Sammie uses in the film, the 1932 Dobro Cyclops becomes the foundation for a transcendent, genre-hopping infusion covering Blues, to Hip-Hop, to Rock, and even Irish Folk. Along with many more genres, the musical aesthetics declare resilience, celebration, sorrow and resistance under systemic racism. In the prologue, Annie mentions a type of person who can produce music that is “so pure it can pierce the veil between life and death, past and future.” Forget the vampire spectacle; an anachronistic musical sequence with Sammie becomes a mighty rallying cry for ancestral preservation and an outstanding feat of technical prowess.
As a bridge between the two halves of the movie, the surreal scene has Sammie's ability as a musician conjure spirits of the African diaspora who defy temporality: modern DJs mixing to oblivion, electric guitarists shredding every note, West African drummers beating to the heavens; even a timeless infusion of rappers, Zulu dancers, and Chinese Kunqu artists swirling across the dance floor. With Coogler as the conductor, and the cast and crew as instruments, they (and many more artists) all perform in perfect, symphonic unison.
Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw captures the montage astutely in a singular, mesmerising three-minute take, promoting the intergenerational power of Black music to shine through as a beacon for culture, community, self-determination and resistance to assimilation. Thanks to Sammie's harmonising power, the Delta Blues ripple, echo, and chime through the America of old, new, and emerging. The Blues, after all, were/are a cornerstone of the expression for Black creativity, autonomy and counter-cultural legacy.
Sinners is as much of a visual feast as it is an auditory one. Whether it be the sultry, salacious blood dripping off the vampiric onslaught, the hot sweat coming off the brows of the Smokestack twin's tailor-made suits (Stack in overconfident red and Smoke in everyman blue), the sprawling vistas of the cotton fields, or the basking moonlight spotlighting Remmick's Irish jig, Coogler absorbs the viewer in a singular vision as seductive as it is horrifically detailed.
Thanks to editor Michael P. Shawver, the handsome production is cut with bullseye precision; Annie tries to strike a match with each rhythmic attempt to the beat of her and Smoke's key musical theme. Sammie's cold open juxtaposes in a flash the open arms of his preaching father to the shuddering embrace of Remmick's claws. Pearline stomps and crawls her way through the song 'Pale, Pale Moon' as the scene crosscuts between her and a gambler getting kicked out for cheating.
The most notable example of the masterful edit features the embers of Sammie's incendiary vocals floating to the sky before they extinguish under Remmick’s conniving gaze. Remmick offers what he thinks is liberty, immortality, and freedom from racism. Despite his own suffering under colonial marginalisation in Ireland, he ultimately becomes a supernatural assimilator – sucking the life from a culture that is not his own. His version of brotherhood is one mind without individuation. These dichotomies remind the viewer that religion, magic, violence, and folktales are as expertly entwined in the story as the camera, the soundscape and the history of storytelling.
The fight for legacy, tradition, and reclamation rages throughout the film. Annie is the wisest of all the characters — the efficacy of her spiritual practise is a way of rejecting Christian dogma, reclaiming the syncretic folk remedies that have become traditions handed down and historically demonised. A parallel to this is Sammie himself, a musical conduit between the physical and spiritual realms. He is not only in a battle for survival, but also one of cultural preservation. Annie’s hoodoo and Sammie’s Blues pave a legacy of freedom and resistance to African enslavement and religious conditioning. More importantly, they serve as an empowerment for reclaiming Black traditions, too often trampled by colonialism and white supremacy.
Sinners is the cinematic achievement of a director building from his previous successes to produce something wholly singular. On paper, mixing the genres of horror, action, historical fiction, and a musical into a blockbuster with a coherent narrative is a tall order. Yet, Ryan Coogler embeds such an aching love for the genre conventions he is remixing and challenging that the final product absolves the film of any sin for creative overreach. Featuring stellar performances, a killer score, and boundary-breaking filmmaking, the film ought to be baptised as an all-time classic.
With its reverence for Delta Blues' spiritual and historical power, Sinners is a triumphant reminder of the fight for truth, culture, and free will to overcome the boundaries of oppression, assimilation, and systemic erasure.
Director: Ryan Coogler
Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O'Connell
Writer: Ryan Coogler
Producers: Ryan Coogler, Zinzi Coogler, Sev Ohanian
Composer: Ludwig Göransson
Cinematographer: Autumn Durald Arkapaw
Editor: Michael P. Shawver
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