SINNERS Review: Ryan Coogler Doesn't Miss, Part V

When pop-culture historians write the final chapter on the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) in the not-so-distant future, filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s (Creed, Fruitvale Station) contribution, Black Panther, to said universe will stand head-and-shoulders above the rest.

 

Black Panther both confirmed Coogler’s keen commercial instincts and a unique ability to mix the personal and the political into a mega-budgeted, comic-book superhero adventure. A sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, was inevitable, but Chadwick Boseman's untimely passing added a level of difficulty few contemporary filmmakers could meet and yet Coogler did, turning an otherwise obligatory sequel,, into a poignant, rousing paean to his late star, simultaneously giving Coogler the rare freedom to make practically whatever he wanted for his next film. 

 

That film, Sinners, an indisputably superb entry in the Southern Gothic horror sub-genre, narratively and thematically connects to Coogler’s long-held, deeply personal preoccupations with African and African-American culture, art, and history (among others).

 

Set in the Deep South, specifically Clarksdale, Mississippi during the Depression (circa 1932), Sinners centers on twin brothers, Smoke and Stack (Coogler’s muse Michael B. Jordan delivering an unquestionably impressive dual performance). World War I veterans turned Chicago enforcers for a Prohibition Era Al Capone. The brothers have returned to their hometown to start a business of their own, a juke joint where music, courtesy of their cousin, Sammie Moore (Miles Caton, in a cheer-worthy star-making turn), a blues singer and guitarist modeled on Robert Johnson, and Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a down, but not out blues luminary, and still illegal liquor, courtesy of a hijacked shipment, will flow from dusk to dawn and back again.

 

For Stack, returning to Clarksdale comes freighted not just with memories, but a childhood friend and a onetime lover, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), eager to renew a long-ago intimate relationship. Stack left for an obvious reason (i.e., her whiteness and the dangers that would pose to them both), but it’s not one Mary recognizes as legitimate, especially where her feelings are concerned.

 

For his twin brother, Smoke, another woman, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), and a tragic history, awaits his return to their hometown. A folkloric practitioner, Annie connects not just Smoke, but through Smoke, the audience, to non-Christian, non-Anglo traditions that will be key when Sinners takes a turn toward the supernatural. Annie also shares a mutual loss with Smoke, one that hangs over their initial reunion and their eventual reconnection.

 

While the trailers and ads give away the central conceit that converts Sinners from a period gangster film into a horror-themed one, it plays at best a minor role during the film’s first hour. Content with languidly introducing characters, backstories, and their connections, Coogler drops the not infrequent hint that the brothers’ endeavor and its inherent promise of a safe space set apart from Jim Crow’s virulent racism and segregation won’t last, possibly not even past the next morning. But at least for that first hour, that promise of freedom, however brief, proves more than enticing to everyone invited to the juke joint’s opening night. 

 

A skillful visual and narrative storyteller, Coogler uses all of the technical means at his disposal to keep the audience fully engaged until the long foreshadowed, inevitable happens: Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a wandering vampire interested in both satisfying his insatiable hunger for human blood and assimilating his victims, along with their thoughts, memories, and personalities, into a cult of personality, promising faux-freedom from the overt white supremacy of the era. What Remmick can’t take by persuasion, of course, he’ll take through violence, the latter involving occasional throat-ripping and massive amounts of blood loss. 

 

Until the horror elements kick in, however, the early part of the night at the juke joint turns on a virtual dance party fueled by the music of Sammie, Delta Slim, and Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a sultry blues singer who catches the inexperienced Sammie’s eye. Literalizing the transcendent nature of the blues and its connection to musical history across the last century (rock-n-roll, hip-hop, and so forth), Coogler collapses space and time in a bravura sequence, offering members of the audience an extended glimpse of music performers past and present and unsurprisingly, yet another subject for pop-culture academics to study closely when Sinners reaches streaming audiences down the line.

 

Coogler certainly doesn’t shy away from showing the ever-growing vampire horde doing their worst to their victims, delivering more than enough visceral gore for audience members expecting as much from Sinners, but those same vampiric elements often feel, if not redundant, then non-essential to  Coogler’s ideas and themes beyond helping to make Sinners more marketable or giving Jordan as Smoke and Stack the opportunity to show his action-hero bonafides (which he does, amply). While supposedly grounded in reality (i.e., sans vampires), a final reel firefight feels like Coogler giving into Tarantino-inspired genre impulses. 

 

Not, of course, that there’s anything wrong or objectionable about that Coogler’s decision to give one particular character the sendoff he obviously deserves. Only that it feels like Coogler, a filmmaker rarely averse to risk-taking or provocation, taking an easier way out story-wise, giving audiences the cathartic kick they desperately want before the end credits and Coogler, oddly giving into another familiar impulse, Marvelizes Sinners via not one, but two separate post-credit sequences.