Sinners review: a barn burnin’, foot stompin’, neck chompin’ good time

Let’s get one thing straight: Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is probably the most original genre film you’ll see in mainstream cinemas this year.

Best described as a Southern gothic blues tribute with vampires (and even then that’s insufficient), Sinners sees Michael B. Jordan playing the dual roles of Smoke and Stack Moore; troubled twins who’ve returned to their home in Mississippi after living out their wildest gangster dreams in Chicago.

Unbeknownst to them, beneath the veneer of emancipation, cottonfields, bone-white chapels and Spanish moss, there is a threat that even the KKK can’t hold a tiki torch to.

Opening with a stunning animated sequence, Sinners sets up a narrative payoff that doesn’t focus on vampires at all, but rather on music and the spirituality that is inseperable from it. We then cut to a little chapel filled with the sounds of gospel, where a young boy (Sammie Moore, played by newcomer Miles Caton) who’s bloody and beaten stumbles down the aisles.

We quickly learn that the preacher is his father, that he’s been playing blues music against his wishes, and that the church positions his being beaten as a sin (and by extension, his own fault). Cut to black. White text appears: one day earlier.

It’s very ambitious opening gambit, and by the time the blood-sucking freaks are involved, there’s a lot of spinning plates in the air. Does Coogler pull off the feat of balancing Black identity, 1930s Southern culture, blues music, Christianity, hoodoo magic and vampires – without descending into chaos? I believe he does.

Watch the trailer for Sinners:

Smoke and Stack, played superbly by Jordan whose subtle expression changes and varying inflections make them two distinct characters, have big dreams – ones that mostly involve owning their own Juke joint, which means they can raise equal parts money and hell. To do that, they’re gonna need a barn.

They manage to purchase said barn from a white businessman who assures them that the KKK ‘ain’t around no more’ – still, the savvy brothers find it pertinent to make their firearm skills known. The dialogue, all written by Coogler, is as sharp as fangs, and has more jokes than I expected.

With that typically Southern dynamic established, the twins set out to find sign writers, cooks, and most importantly: blues musicians – coz it ain’t a party without music!

The first act, which I’ll call ‘getting the band back together’, cruises along at a 12-bar tempo, bringing immediately to mind The Blues Brothers, a film which also sees criminal brothers getting a band together for a big concert, and playing lots of blues music along the way (though such a comparison probably says more about my lack of African American film knowledge than anything else).

The band begins with Sammie, Smoke and Stack’s little cousin who’s got a preternatural gift for the guitar, and is completed with Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a multi-instrument blues veteran who’d do just about anything for a cold glass of beer.

There’s also Bo and Grace Chow, a Chinese couple who own the local grocery store (and can provide stacks of catfish for joint’s opening night), Cornbread (Omar Miller), a comic relief type who’ll act as a bouncer, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Smoke’s scorned lover, and Annie (Wunmi Musako), a wise hoodoo practicer who’s also the mother of Stack’s deceased infant daughter.

These characters that fill out this world of Sinners are far from Southern stereotypes, each of them brimming with clearly established desires and intriguing backstories that inform us of the humans they are – before the aforementioned vampires threaten to make them unhuman.

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When the vampires do eventually come around, they’re established, unsurprisingly, as a predominantly White threat, who use the socially acceptable ‘polite’ customs of the time to overcome their main barrier to blood-feasting: being invited in. In terms of following the vampire rules, these ones are pretty much by the book: garlic, sunlight and holy water alike will burn their flesh, and stakes will destroy their hearts (but that last one pretty much goes for anyone, right?).

I particularly appreciated the unique design choice to have their eyes glow red, like the way yours would if you were photographed on an old camera with an overzealous use of the flash. It enhances the feeling of them being people who aren’t quite right.

I could fill a book with an analysis of all the different ways vampires can be used for metaphors, and in Sinners there’s certainly easy themes of racism, cultural appropriation and gentrification to draw out. But for me, it all comes back to the music.

Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson blends 1930s Delta blues styles with Gothic organs, rock ‘n’ roll, and hip hop, which all comes to a head in a gorgeous sequence that sees West African tribal dancers, 1980s guitarists, DJs, R’n’B singers, and modern rappers all congregate in spirit-form on the Juke joint dance floor. It is, for me, the most memorable scene of the film, and is surprisingly sans-exsanguination.

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Understanding music as a form of connection to your ancestral culture is the key to understanding this film, and leaves all the vampire carnage as something of an afterthought. But it is certainly tonnes of fun to watch the fanged horror unfold, and Coogler makes it all make perfect sense, with each side of the film complimenting the other like catfish and cornbread.

Aside from being a certified barn-burner at the cinema, Sinners is also a very good looking film (and no, I’m not just talking about Michael B. Jordan). Shot by cinematrographer Autumn Durald on IMAX cameras, it’s worth forking out the extra bucks to see this beautiful flick on the largest screen imaginable.

It’s just a shame that us reviewers didn’t get to see it in its intended format, instead being relegated to Crown Casino’s VMax cinema (not a bad experience by any means, but I do feel strongly that an IMAX film should be seen at an IMAX cinema).

Sinners is out in Australian cinemas now.