Ryan Coogler has a great deal he wants to say in SINNERS, so much in fact that one genre would not be adequate to cover it all. Hence his treatise on the evils of racism and the oppression of religion encompasses an epic of magical realism that leaps off the screen with its boundless energy and anger. If it is not a perfect film, it nonetheless an ambitious one that leaves its audience hankering for more, and if that’s not the definition of a great film, I don’t know what is.
We are in the hot and dusty delta of Mississippi in October 1932, where Hoodoo and Christianity abide side by side with the same unease as the black and white citizens, stuck with each other, and chafing at the inevitability of interaction. Here, the Klan has free reign, and the uppity Moore twins, Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) have returned from sojourns in Chicago and World War I with a worldview at odds with the locals. Decked out in slick suits, they have the cosmopolitan air that at which the local Caucasians can only gawk with bemused interest, and they have the resources to buy an abandoned mill with cash money and an attitude that includes the weaponry to elicit a grudging, insincere, respect from the seller (David Maldonado). In the next 24 hours, the mill will become a juke joint, a fledgling blues man, Sammie Moore (Miles Catton), will grab his destiny, and the twins will grapple with their past loves and future prospects amid a cacophonic mosaic of cultures, dreams, and the supernatural. That would be vampire because when you need a reconceptualized metaphor, that one is especially potent.
Make no mistake. These vampires, led by an Irish expat (Jack O’Connell) who first appears covered in burns with smoke rising from his flesh, are as vicious and bloodthirsty as the Jim Crow system at work in that time and place. They are also enchanted by music, which brings them to Sammy and his gift to pierce the veil between this world and the next, a concept visualized in a dazzling production number that mixes the past, present, and future as ancestors and descendants whirl and reel with the sharecroppers eking out an evening of joy from their anguished existence. The expat wants Sammie to use his gift to conjure up his own ancestors for a healing reunion, and he is willing to wipe out a wide swath of the local population to do so.
If Coogler wanted to convey the mystical qualities of music, he has more than succeeded here, and by placing it in the context of race and religion, he has walked boldly into fraught topics with an easy assurance and an incisive viewpoint that mixes the casual violence of quotidian life with the bracing incursion of the paranormal variety. His characters provide a panorama of local culture, including the local Choctaw tribe who try in, ahem, vain, to warn a white couple about their peculiar visitor begging to be asked in, the Chinese shopkeepers who cater, separately, to both the black and white residents of the delta, and the women in Smoke and Stack’s life, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), the local hoodoo practitioner who unravels what is happening while nursing a broken heart, and Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), the woman who can pass as white that Stack left behind for what he thought would be a better life for her. Yet within the larger tale are bits of unexpected humor to temper horror and the emotional tug of star-crossed romance. The graphic yet avuncular lecture on how to please a woman counters the brutality of keeping the object of one’s affection safe, especially when it involves counterintuitive pain.
Visually, this is a film as powerful as its message. It is replete with cotton fields that stretch for miles, dwarfing the people dependent on them. There is the subtlety of a tracking shot showing Grace (Li Jun Li) walking from her store on the black side of the street to the one on the white side, or the presaging smoke from candles spiraling in tendrils behind Annie and Smoke at their reunion, to the suspense of a vampire asking to be invited in, to the sweep of fire in several manifestations.
SINNERS begins and ends with Sammie, a prodigal son, bloody and bedraggled, returning to his father’s church and being begged by the older man to drop the guitar and the devil’s music if represents. In between, Coogler has presented a dialectic on power, freedom, equality, and love as haunting as the moonlight, and as essential as the roots music he has included. It is a first-rate spectacle of style and substance that embraces an operatic flair for its incendiary intention.
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