“Sinners” Pierces the Veil Between Horror & Historical Drama
Mississippi in the Jim Crow era is not the setting one would expect for a vampire story. When you think of vampires, your mind likely wanders to cold, unforgiving castles somewhere in Europe. Sinners ditches that world for the dusty, sweaty Mississippi Delta in Ryan Coogler’s return to feature filmmaking outside the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With an utterly bombastic score that fuels the entire music-focused film, Sinners proves to be a thrilling homecoming for Coogler’s visionary direction.
Elijah and Elias Moore, known as Smoke and Stack respectively (both played by Michael B. Jordan), are World War I veterans who grew up in the Mississippi Delta. All their lives, they’ve chased freedom. It’s led them overseas to war and to Chicago, where they worked for the mob. After many years away, they’ve returned home with bags of money and a desire to open a juke joint. Smoke and Stack purchase an abandoned sawmill from a racist landowner (David Maldonado) and decide the juke joint’s grand opening will be that very night. The brothers enlist their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) to play the blues, and discover that he has a truly special gift when it comes to singing. As Smoke and Stack prepare for the opening, they find themselves drawn to the women (Wunmi Mosaku & Hailee Steinfeld) they left behind years ago. Of course, opening a juke joint is hard enough on its own, but then a charismatic vampire (Jack O'Connell) shows up on the doorstep.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Music is an important throughline for Sinners. The film opens with a voiceover explaining that some musicians, only the truest of the bunch, have the ability to conjure spirits from the past and the future. Sometimes, when one of these true people sings, the veil is pierced and life and death exist at the same time. It’s a magical, compelling conceit, one that creates a lofty promise the film must then make good on. Sinners has introduced the idea that they have a character who will make music so powerful, time and space will bend upon themselves. Maybe the greatest miracle of the film is that it actually has found a voice that might have the ability to do just that in Miles Canton’s Sammie. Canton has been singing since the age of two, but Sinners, astoundingly, marks his first feature acting performance. When the audience initially meets Sammie, he’s bloodied and limping, carrying a broken guitar neck. We don’t hear him sing until about thirty minutes into the movie. He’s riding around with Stack, who encourages him to play something as they drive, and when Sammie finally does sing, Stack’s jaw drops. There’s a deep soul within Canton’s voice that resonates through space and time, just as Sinners said it would.
The first two-thirds of Sinners is a fairly standard period piece, and then the vampires show up. The film isn’t standard in the sense that it’s expected or by the numbers, but because it’s a story grounded in real history. The premise of Black brothers trying to get a piece of freedom for themselves in a violently racist time, whose ripple effects are still being felt today, is a fulfilling story in its own right. When Sinners introduces its supernatural element, it doesn’t lose the thematic, historical ties the film has introduced. One could see the fight for these characters to make it to morning as a symbolic reference to sundown towns, or the vampires acting as a metaphor for the way White people have taken Black cultures while actively hating the people who created the cultures.
Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Sinners, like its vampiric characters, is seductive before its teeth sink fully into the audience. Once it gets a grip it will not let go, and what a genuine joy ride that creates for the viewer. Sinners is bombastic, bloody, and bold. It’s the type of filmmaking that’s been sorely missing in the world of blockbusters. Where style and substance crash into one another, tangling themselves into an awe-inspiring marvel. We need larger-than-life sequences that fill up every inch of the silver screen and remind us what movies are capable of. Sinners is all passion all the time, a kiss on the neck followed by a vicious bite.
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