With Sinners, Ryan Coogler Delivers an Unevenly Excellent Vampire Gothic
After years in the Marvel mines, the Creed director returns with a bloody genre musical.
When Fruitvale Station hit theaters in 2013, it was the mark of a major new talent. Director Ryan Coogler, at the time not yet 30, went on to make Creed, a righteous revamping of the Rocky films, and then moved into the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), directing two Black Panther films. The first was well received and remains the only MCU film to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, but though it touches on Coogler's recurring themes of generational tension and black identity it still, in retrospect, feels like a work-for-hire product, just another superhero movie with clunky special effects and a palette that looks a little too much like television. The sequel, which was hastily rewritten after the tragic death of star Chadwick Boseman, wasn't even that. It was a muddled, overlong, franchise-extending mess—less a movie on its own terms than an extended advertisement for future Marvel projects. It was an apt metaphor for Coogler's own career, which had been sidelined for years by Hollywood's biggest franchise.
Sinners, Coogler's latest, is a movie on his own terms. It's a vampire movie at heart, with hefty nods to From Dusk Till Dawn in particular, but it's also a bloody Southern Gothic with elements of the early George Romero zombie films, a lament about the loss and legacy of black art, and even, at times, a sort of musical. It's bold, distinctive, and uneven but often excellent—a new take on the vampire movie that, well, doesn't suck.
Sinners is set in 1930s Mississippi, as twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Coogler's regular collaborator Michael B. Jordan, arrive in a sharecropping town and set up a juke joint in a derelict factory. They purchase the property from a local Ku Klux Klan leader, warning him to stay off their turf, and then tour the town, picking up talent to help staff their operation. There's a doorman, a cook, an immigrant couple to help paint the signs and tend the bar, and even a drunken blues man played by Delroy Lindo, who is always a welcome presence on screen. The brothers also bring along their cousin, Sammie, a soulful young man with a fancy-looking guitar and a deep voice.
This takes time—nearly an hour of the movie's running time, which makes it play something like a Jim Crow South riff on Seven Samurai. But eventually, they convene at the juke joint and get the party started.
And then the vampires arrive, carrying instruments of their own and playing Irish jigs while begging, almost politely, to be let into the juke joint and add their own voices to the mix. They just want to become part of the family.
This might sound abrupt, and in some ways it is, but the movie seeds magical possibilities in Sammie's music, with his songs capable of collapsing space and time. In what is easily the movie's most audacious sequence, a song by Sammie brings together the past and present of black music, from Afro-futurist electric guitar players to simple drummers to DJs scratching records, club style. Under Sammie's spell, the juke joint becomes an intertemporal fantasia of black musical art.
It's an astounding sequence, especially in a film with a major studio logo at the front, and would be even more so if the film had better ideas about how to pay it off. Instead, it returns to its jig-playing vampires. And while they have their own songs and try to tempt the clubgoers into joining their musical ideas together, mostly what they want is blood.
Inevitably, blood is what they get. It's a vampire movie, after all, and a pretty good one. But Coogler tries to stuff a plenitude of ideas and concepts into the genre, and they don't always fit. You sense him having a lot to say, after those years in the MCU, and he tries to say it all at once.
Still, Sinners, which was shot on 65mm film for IMAX, looks great, with haunting low-light photography around sunset and sunrise and velvety shadows enveloping the scenes at night. And Jordan's dual performance as former mob men—they spent time running liquor in Capine's Chicago—is his best in years.
It's a fitting return for a promising director who looked like he might be subsumed by the imperatives superhero machine: Sinners is a vampire film, yes, but it's also an artistic atonement.
