Sinners begins with a prologue showing us how different cultures regarded their powerful storytellers, including the African griots. Writer-director Ryan Coogler doesn’t make the comparison, but he is a griot. Lots of people can tell a story. He casts a mystical and mysterious narrative spell that frequently opens fissures in our sense of reality. I don’t rate his historical drama/siege thriller as his best film, but this wild and wildly original foray into Jordan Peele’s territory is undeniably fascinating.
The movie takes place in 1932 in Clarksville, Mississippi, to which the Smokestack Twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return after seven years working in Chicago, supposedly for Al Capone. Though they’re carrying sacks full of cash, they’re done with the Windy City: “Chicago ain’t shit but Mississippi with tall buildings ’stead of plantations.” They use their money to buy an abandoned sawmill and turn it into a full-service blues joint, and their trump card is their cousin, Preacher Boy (Miles Caton), an otherworldly musician so nicknamed because he’s the son of a minister (Saul Williams) who believes blues are Satan’s music.
Even before things turn supernatural, the setup is promising. Jordan gives two bracing performances as Smoke, who’s the muscle in the twins’ partnership, and Stack, who’s the salesman with the silver tongue. They interact with a Mississippi town that’s more layered than we usually see in Hollywood movies, one that includes a Hoodoo practitioner (Wunmi Mosaku) involved with Smoke, a Chinese family that owns two grocery stores across the street from each other (one for the Black customers and one for the white ones), and a posse of Choctaw bounty hunters that I wish we learned more about. The setting doesn’t allow for as many visual flourishes as Black Panther did, but this level of detail in the writing goes some way to make up for it.
Acting in his first movie, Caton is a gospel singer’s son who easily fits the part of a blues prodigy. When Preacher Boy sings “I Lied to You,” the song rips open the time-space continuum to allow both ancient African djembé drummers and present-day rappers and DJs to join him onstage, and you believe that his voice can conjure all that. It’s a crazy sequence reminiscent of the Ivorian film Night of the Kings in its testament to the power of art to knit together time periods and move people in strange ways.
Shortly thereafter, a menacing group of white people roll up to the new juke joint saying, “We heard tell of a party,” and just as you’re thinking you’ve seen this movie before, they turn out to be vampires. Coogler doesn’t foreshadow this quite as deftly as Peele would have, but he does have a Peele-like fight between the brothers after one of them is turned. The conjure woman wounds one of the vampires by hitting him with a pickle jar full of garlic cloves, and there’s an eerie visual when the club’s doorman (Omar Benson Miller) goes off for a pee break and finds that the fireflies lighting up the trees behind him aren’t fireflies. Best of all is when the vampires do their own version of a cross burning with the head vampire (Jack O’Connell) singing “Rocky Road to Dublin” at the center of a big Irish dance number. He later announces that he’s forming a new Ku Klux Klan. The old Klan has something to say about that before we’re through.
In the end, it does feel as if Coogler has a few too many ideas in his intellectual stew. His metaphors aren’t as thoroughly worked out as they were in Black Panther, and the same goes for the character of Stack’s mixed-race girlfriend (Hailee Steinfeld). Yet this horror film’s unique premise is wedded to an intriguing mix of themes and backstopped by a soundtrack full of both old blues songs and new ones made to sound old. (It includes a cameo by Buddy Guy as an aged Preacher Boy in the 1990s, and the post-credit sequence with Caton singing “This Little Light of Mine” is worth the price of admission itself.) Even when it doesn’t make sense, Sinners is an experience that frames Delta blues in a wholly unexpected way and is also a better vampire movie than last winter’s Nosferatu remake. What other movie gives you that?
