Director: Ryan Coogler Starring: Michael B. Jordans, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Delroy Lindo, Wummi Mosaku, Li Jun Li, Miles Caton Running Time: 137 minutes
After a decade and change of the blockbuster film landscape being almost entirely lead by 30+ year old franchise Intellectual Property still reigning in its dozenth iteration, I began to wonder if there would ever be a next generation of ‘name brand’ directors. Who in the last fifteen years has come onto the scene and been able to sell a movie on just their name in the way that the 1990s minted the Tarantinos and Andersons (plural) of the world. The notable exception to the rule had been Jordan Peele, who springboarded from a beloved sketch comedy show into “elevated” Blumhouse fare before more fully maturing into the masterful Spielberg-esque Nope in 2022, but a question mark has been sitting beside Ryan Coogler’s name for some time.
After his 2013 debut feature Fruitvale Station, taking both forks of the oh-so-common path of critically acclaimed independent drama to legacy sequel or Marvel movie with Creed and Black Panther, Ryan Coogler did emerge as somewhat of a defining filmmaker of the 2010s (at least if you want to define it positively). Despite having a billion dollar-movie under his belt, you can tell that his new film Sinners is being made with a mountain to prove.
It’s Coogler’s first entirely original film, reuniting with his career-long muse Michael B. Jordan in a dual-starring role, and it’s a clearly contained one-and-done genre piece the likes of which feel extraordinarily rare on this kind of scale these days. The film follows Jordan as Smoke and Stack, spoken of in hushed tones as ‘The Smokestack Twins’, a set of gangster twins returning from Chicago to their hometown in the Jim Crow South to open a humble juke joint. The film takes some luxurious time getting to the horror turn you’ll know is coming if you’ve seen any of the promotional materials, but it really benefits from it. Many horror films love to leanly rush you through the more human drama of their opening set-up and jump right into the heightened monster business that they think you’ve paid to see, but Sinners takes its time as Smoke and Stack split up to do their rounds in the town and put together the staff and suppliers of their juke joint, and it’s much stronger for it.
As they roll out a supporting cast of familiar faces like Delroy Lindo and Hailee Steinfeld as well as a veritable buffet of newer talents like Wunmi Mosaku and Li Jun Li, you get to feel for this community and the way it’s brought together and torn apart over the course of the night at the juke joint. At the heart of the ensemble is a revelatory introductory role for Miles Caton as Sammie, the twins’ prodigious young blues player cousin. Caton’s voice booms through the score in a film that deeply wants you to feel every beat of its music, with a fantastic tempo to Michael P. Shawver’s edit set by the always fantastic fusion compositions of Ludwig Göransson.
Now. I’m sure you know by now that this is a vampire movie. It’s been played a little bit coy as the movie’s rolled out, but it hasn’t been too hard to make out from it. The film’s turn to action horror is fantastically effective, all the time it spends in setting up the juke joint creates more intimate stakes than many films of its like can hope to accomplish. All that said, the thing I’ve stuck to in the week since I saw this film is what exactly the film is reaching for with the vampires as a metaphor. Maybe you can see them for just vampires and be satisfied, but I’ve become a little hung up on it.
The lead vampire who brings the affliction to the story is Jack O’Connell’s Remmick, an Irish emigrant who stumbles away from the pursuit of both angry Klansmen who don’t know what he is and a group of Native Americans who very much do. O’Connell is an English actor, but his dad is from the same town in Kerry as mine, shockingly, and he performs the role fantastically, he has the perfect level of unsettling charm and concealed hunger that embodies most Southern Gothic takes on the vampire.
O’Connell’s presence as Remmick took what I initially expected to be an easy-to-read story about white American culture glomming onto and sucking the energy from black American music to something entirely different. As Remmick’s little vampire hivemind outside the joint grows while they wait to be invited in, they have a céilí! This is your best chance to hear Rocky Road To Dublin performed over IMAX speakers! There’s a particular moment of post-colonial solidarity (I suppose?) around a recitation of the The Lord’s Prayer in the film’s climax that’s been sitting in my head all week. Frankly, I think it’s extremely cool that a movie of this scale is letting me think about all of this, especially after the truly dismal start to the year that American film has had.
Sinners is a tight genre exercise on the surface with a lot bubbling under, and maybe the source of the most hope I’ve had for the future of the American blockbuster in memory (provided there even is an American film industry in a year’s time). It’s also the best IMAX film since Oppenheimer, if you’re eager to fork over for the ticket surcharge.
(4.5 / 5)