Dark Night of the Soul: SINNERS

There’s a transcendent sequence in the middle of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners where the power of blues music blows apart the boundaries between space and time. A 1930s’ speakeasy concert starts with a few chords on an inherited guitar and then suddenly, with a fluid camera move, is layered with inspirations past and present until ghosts and premonitions share the same space as the roof is set ablaze. It’s as bold and earnest and symbolically rich a gesture as any sequence a Hollywood genre picture has ever given us. It’s also the highest high in a high-powered movie—a musical and muscular and confident piece of craft. Coogler gives us a historical dark fantasy Deep South vampire musical and plays fair with each component part as he makes them a coherent whole. It’s a film that flows with The Blues, a heartfelt yowl of pain so potent it summons the supernatural. It’s also a film that moves with an urgent craftsmanship that propels its images and ideas forward to populist crowd-pleasing effect. Coogler has long been one of our most promising young directors. His based-on-a-true-story Sundance debut Fruitvale Station is a warm, intimate real-life tragedy. His following franchise efforts somehow center that same intimacy, with Creed finding new nuanced character studies stepping out of the shadow of Stallone’s Rocky, and his Black Panthers tackling messy sociopolitical and moving interpersonal concerns within the slam-bang explosions of CG expected from such entries. So of course Sinners shares the recognizable thematic preoccupations of a Coogler picture. It’s about legacy, lineage, protecting one’s community with a tension between insularity and inspiration, fraught family dynamics, grief, manipulation, and the light of mortal goodness in the depths of immortal darkness. And it displays these themes in massive, iconographic shots in filmic IMAX frames—a deeply satisfying crackling warmth imbuing its story with the personal touch—set to a crunchy, textured, regional score from the reliably excellent, and surprising, Ludwig Goransson.

It’s a visually and sonically enveloping blockbuster, suggesting an enormous world beyond its margins while balancing the genuine emotionality of characters’ earnest communications with the outsized metaphors of supernatural invasion. The first half of the picture follows twin gangsters (Coogler’s regular star Michael B. Jordan in a neat dual role) returned to their rural hometown from a stint in the Chicago mob wars. They’ve escaped with enough money and booze to build their own juke joint on the outskirts of sharecropper’s cotton acres. We watch as they set out recruiting people who’ll help them with their grand opening—an innocent cousin (Miles Caton), an ex-wife (Wunmi Mosaku), a bouncer (Omar Miller), a drunk pianist (Delroy Lindo), bartenders (Li Jun Li and Yao), and some attractive partiers (Hailee Steinfeld and Jayme Lawson). Their business is intended to be a refuge from Jim Crow oppression and hard work in the fields. But their solidarity is threatened by the vampire (Jack O’Connell) who hears the call of their music and demands to be let in. Coogler frames the conflict in eerie slow building to spasms of violence. In its melancholic final moments, quiet after the loud catharsis, we see a young man, changed by his experiences of that fateful night, fully embodying a memorable observation of Bram Stoker's Dracula: "No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be." The movie’s moral seriousness and storytelling seduction are clearly in conversation with others of its blood-sucking genre—Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark’s roving rural vampires and John Carpenter’s Vampires’ pseudo-mythic realism, and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn’s giddy fang reveals. But it’s all Coogler in its crackling synthesis that’s a hugely satisfying popcorn experience and an honest expression of his thematic and stylistic concerns. It uses the tropes well, and has a tense escalation from the logic of their clever deployment, cutting on actions, and cross-cutting with a teasing sense of build and release that matches its emotional skill. To see it is to see one of our best young filmmakers step fully into his power.