“Sinners” Movie Review – Spotlight Report
Ryan Coogler‘s Sinners is his first foray into horror, and mines its inspiration from a rich vein of supernatural stories embedded in blues music.
Seeking refuge from their criminal careers in Chicago, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown to start a legitimate business with their ill-gotten gains. They purchase an old barn and turn it into a juke joint, enlisting gifted young musician Sammie (Miles Caton) to perform on opening night. Little do they know that Sammie’s singing has attracted the attention of Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a deadly supernatural being with a taste for music and more. They’ve got the talent, the venue and the customers, but can they survive the night?
Sinners is an extraordinarily lush film, set in a richly-depicted Mississippi Delta in which religion, magic and music are inextricably linked. Shot in an extremely wide aspect ratio that occasionally opens up to some striking IMAX shots courtesy of cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the film feels like a beautiful picture book accompanying a Robert Johnson compilation. The music, too, is remarkable and mostly period-appropriate, with Ludwig Göransson’s tastefully augmented arrangement of blues weaving its spell with undeniable power. The cast is teeming with talent, including Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld and Wunmi Mosaku, all of whom add real life to the film. Coogler takes his time, letting the film establish its characters and their relationships at a very leisurely pace, until it turns into an action horror that feels remarkably similar to From Dusk till Dawn. This is the point that might turn some viewers off, but is also what everything has been leading up to, and while not executed with the flair or beauty of the first half, is probably the reason most people will go and see the film.
Where Sinners is more inscrutable is in its thematic material. Coogler‘s film portrays the blues as a sort of sacred rite, engaged in by the sinners of the title. When Sammie plays his guitar, the juke joint is filled with the spirits of ancestors and descendants of his musical tradition, playing and dancing along with him and the gyrating customers. Coogler‘s principal characters embrace a shamanistic Hoodoo belief system and seem to largely reject Christian morality, favouring a more licentious, Dionysian lifestyle. His gangster antiheroes are criticised as immoral by more upstanding members of the community, especially Sammie’s father, a stern preacher who considers his son’s music to be literally infernal. When Remmick approaches the juke joint, he offers to take them into his pan-cultural musical collective that also rejects Christianity and credibly claims to be offering a way out of the depredations of the Jim Crow-era South and revenge for past wrongs, but it’s clear that accepting this deal will require Sammie to literally sell his soul. On the one hand, there are murderous klansmen waiting for an opportunity to attack Smoke, Stack and Sammie, and on the other hand there are literal monsters with sympathetic historical baggage that want to team up but will erase the protagonists’ distinctive cultural identity. It’s clear that Remmick, who is of a pagan Irish background, represents a force of assimilationist cultural theft ready to snap up unwitting musicians. Coogler’s characters are understandably obsessed with freedom, given their time and place, but they seek it through cultural isolationism. Does Coogler share these characters’ historically-specific beliefs and does he extend them to other cultures? Is Coogler calling principled religious people, manual labourers and artists working within the system sell-outs? There are questions raised in Sinners about the nature, the cost or even the desirability of artistic and cultural authenticity, and it’s not clear if Coogler can’t answer these questions or simply prefers to leave them unresolved. Whether an audience finds that ambiguity satisfying or merely evasive is up to them.
To be clear, Sinners is a film with exceptional qualities. It looks and sounds remarkable, explores the complex moral territory of a very specific time and place and it’s also a big old gory horror film about a magical bluesman in the Deep South. For some people the experience will be ecstatic and others might be left wondering who to really root for with all these damned sinners behaving the way they do.
