Film Review: "Sinners"
Haunting, powerful, and devastating, Ryan Coogler's Southern Gothic horror forces a confrontation with the ugliness and terror of America's White racist history.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.
Sinners, the new horror film from Ryan Coogler, is one of those movies which I have been eagerly awaiting ever since I saw the trailer. Part of my excitement stemmed from the director–I continue to think that Black Panther is one of the very best things that MCU has ever produced–and also because I’m a little in love with Michael B. Jordan. I’m also a sucker for anything that partakes in the Southern Gothic tradition, and the trailer made it clear that Sinners was going to be Southern Gothic in its purest, most unadulterated form.
Let me assure you: it does not disappoint. Coogler has given us a delicious piece of Southern Gothic vampire storytelling, crafting a film that’s equal parts poignant and terrifying and haunting. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is one of those films that will leave you grappling with its truths long after it’s over, forcing a confrontation with the ugly histories of racist violence that continue to seethe under the surface of American life.
The film opens with Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore (newcomer Miles Caton, who shows that he has a bright career in front of him) stumbling into his father’s church, face scratched and guitar shattered. We’re then taken to the previous day, when twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their small Mississippi town to start a juke joint, gathering Sammie and several others along the way. At first the joint seems like it might be a success, given the huge crowd that arrives and the intensity of the music. However, things quickly turn deadly once a vampire, Remmick (played with deranged glee by Jack O’Connell) shows up with two of his minions and, after luring Mary out into the darkness and turning her, they use her to wreak havoc. A small group of the unturned attempts to survive until the sun comes up, with mixed success.
It probably goes without saying, but Michael B. Jordan is quite simply sex on legs. From the moment that he saunters onto the screen as Smoke and Stack–aptly known as the Smokestack twins–it’s clear that these two young men have seen a lot. They’re handsome and suave, to be sure, but there’s a violence lurking beneath their hauteur cocky demeanor. And, as so often with Jordan’s characters, there’s also a lot of hurt behind those beautiful eyes and the muscled physique, and it’s precisely the twinning of the brutal and the beautiful that makes Jordan’s characterization, and the film as a whole, so devastating and so powerful.
Indeed, violence haunts this film in ways both large and small, and not just because this is, at the end of the day, a story about vampires. It’s there in the casual way in which the White characters wield the n-word with casual cruelty–including the aptly-named Hogwood (David Maldonado), who sells the old sawmill to the twins with the intent on leading an attack on them–and it’s there in the way that this is so clearly the Jim Crow South, where Black life is characterized all too often by backbreaking menial labor in the cotton fields, by chain gangs, and random acts of White racist violence.
At the same time, there is happiness here, too. The first hour is actually very funny, thanks no only to Jordan’s twins but also the various men they encounter, including rascally musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) and bouncer Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller). They also recruit Chinese-American shopkeepers Grace and Bo (Li Jun Li and Yao), both of whom are a delight. Yet there is sadness here, too, and a sense of lost chances and paths not taken, particularly when we meet Stack’s former lover Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) and Smoke’s wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), who has more than a passing acquaintance with the world of spirits and magic. Smoke and Annie’s reunion is as smoldering and sweaty and seethingly sexy as you could ask for in a Southern Gothic film, and the chemistry between Jordan and Mosaku is as intense as a Mississippi southern storm.
At first, I thought that the choice to spend about an hour immersing us in the world before introducing us to the sinister vampire villain was a misstep. I mean, if you hadn’t seen the trailers, you might not even know that you were watching a vampire movie until the moment when Remmick stumbles into the frame and manages to seduce a couple of lower-class White folks to let him into their home. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to see this as precisely the point that the film is trying to make. White violence is so terrifying and so destructive precisely because it erupts when you least expect it. It’s also horrifyingly seductive, and O’Connell’s performance gives us a vampire who is convincing precisely because he offers up the chance to escape the cycle of racist violence that suffuses this world. After all, if you’re going to be killed by rampaging Klansmen anyway, why not just give in and join the ranks of the undead?
Remmick’s turning of many of those who came to the juke to escape the drudgery and violence of the Jim Crow South is so devastating precisely because we’ve seen how much joy they take in being able to congregate in a space that is made by them and for them. One of my favorite moments in the film revolves around Sammie’s musical performance, which is so powerful that it literally seems to blur the boundary between the past, the present, and the future. As the camera moves around the room, we see dancers and singers from various points in time, suggesting that temporality itself has collapsed. All time is this time,
While the ending was thrilling, the climax does feel a bit rushed. I keep going back to the moment when Grace, driven nearly mad by the thought that her daughter might be preyed on by Remmick and his minions (which, at this point, also include Bo) that she screams an invitation to the vampires, thus allowing them to invade the juke joint. This seems to be a moment that’s motivated more by the need to get the vampires into the juke joint than by any character motivation. The rest of the film’s climax and denouement are likewise a bit too rushed, though Remmick’s immolation is remarkably satisfying.
For all of that, Sinners is still extraordinary horror filmmaking and, like all great horror films, it injects some pathos into its final moments. I couldn’t help but feel sad at watching the sun-drenched destruction of those who’ve been turned–including, it’s worth noting, Sammie’s love interest and Cornbread–as the sun comes up. After all, we’ve come to know and appreciate these characters, for all that they’ve now become nothing more than shambling bloodthirsty monsters. To watch them burst into flame is to know that, in America, Black joy and celebration, particularly in the Jim Crow South, ends in fire and blood.
There’s something fitting–if also unsettling–about the fact that Stack and Mary survived the immolation of their maker and their fellow vampires, thanks to Smoke’s last-minute mercy, as we find out in the mid-credits sequence. White parasitical violence might have utterly destroyed the dream that the Smokestack twins sought to carve out in the racist landscape of Mississippi, but at least two people have managed to forge a future, even if it’s circumscribed by the nature of being a vampire. Even Sammie–played as his older self by Buddy Guy–who would have more reason to hate these two vampires more than anyone else, seems almost relieved that his cousin has managed to carve out an existence for himself, for all that it might be one devoid of the sun or his brother or, perhaps most heartbreaking of all, his freedom. He is, though, wise enough to turn down the gift of immortality.
This, I think, is the point of Sinners. The film repeatedly reminds us that the racism baked into America is designed to either destroy Black joy and agency or, at the very least, to bind it with so many chains that it can never be exercised. All that remains is to claim as much agency as one can, even if doing so means becoming an undead haunter of the night.
Thus are the wages of White racism.