SINNERS (Ryan Coogler 2025)
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RYAN COOGLER: SINNERS (2025)
Surreal juke joint
A few years ago, Brian Coogler took over the superhero film for black people. Now he has done the same for - but wait: what genre is he taking over this time? More than one. Ultimately Sinners resolves itself into a zombie movie, but it's also very much a musical whose most stunning number, of many rousing and beautiful ones, with solos, ensembles, and dancing, is performed by the eighty-eight-year-old Chicago blues great, Buddy Guy. And early on there is something of the Western, and also an actioner. This is a costume drama, sensitive to period. And then it's just surreal - and musical, with a series of soul-satisfying numbers. But it's zombie to the end. And uplifting. And yes, brilliant and amazing.
Sinner has been described as "genre-fluid" - you can say that again- that "blends elements of vampire horror, Southern Gothic, gangster movie, period drama, and musical". This is both a stunner and a stunt. It's an eyefull and a mouthful. It's a lot to swallow, but it never stops being engaging. Even when it looks like it's started the closing credits, you'd better not take your eyes and your ears off it. Will this make the Academy take the hitherto taboo horror genre seriously at awards time? We'll see. But the phrase "something for everyone" almost applies, though there's a lot more sex than romance here. For sure, it's hard to imagine anyone other than Coogler carrying off such a thing as this.
But he has, and it will be one to watch and watch again. As Amy Nicholson says in her rave Los Angeles Times review, which calls it "a Southern vampire horror-musical" that is both "stunning" and "glorious," Sinners is "not merely a great movie but an eternal movie, one that will transcend today's box office and tomorrow's awards to live on as a forever favorite."
Cloning is in style now, so just as in Mickey 17 we got two Robert Pattinsons on screen at once, we get two Michael B. Jordans here, playing identical twins Smoke and Stack — World War I veterans — who return to Clarksdale in the Jim Crow South, the Mississippi Delta, after surviving gangster years in Chicago. They might as well come home, they say, because the years have taught them Chicago is nothing but the Jim Crow Delta with tall buildings. They arrive with money and booze to do something big, buy an old sawmill from a local "cracker" named Hogwood (David Maldonado) to turn it into a juke joint, planning to galvanize the black people of the region, make a good profit while providing them with a soul-satisfying relief from their tortured lives. What follows very quickly is one hell of a night, with all that implies.
The genre-blending and -switching is breathtaking. But what is most awesome is how the genres reinforce each other, and eventually make you forget all about genre - almost anyway. There's a Western feel in the setup passages. This is when Smoke and Stack are arriving in the Mississippi Delta flatland, driving around in their flimsy open truck and meeting up with hostility from the local crackers. (For a change there is a low N-word count, though there are F-words, plus a C-word you don't hear very often). The Western touch is in how, early on, lines are drawn, and boundaries and allies sought. And that works, because Westerns draw their lines clearly as do no other movies.
An episodic section follows when Smoke and Stack meet up with a series of people they need to perform or to be present, or not to be present in the case of Stack's mixed-race, passed-for-white ex Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who shows up anyway. The transition from action-historical-musical to zombie-vampire-horror begins with the most memorable showpiece, when the singing and dancing rise to a fever pitch so high that the whole building appears to dissolve into flame and vanish, leaving only the dancing figures. But the building's still there.
It is at this point, having just rewatched Jean Cocteau's three masterp,ieces, Blood of a Poet, The Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus, that I said to myself This is surrealism. But the music, warm, present, and real, is what binds everything together.
This musical aspect, though, takes on a strange, haunting implication when the Irish minstrels appear, Led by Remmick (played by the great Anglo-Irish actor Jack O'Connell). The minstrels are a small band of vampires not at all like traditional horror villains but depicted as quietly appealing. It bothered me to think that the Irish enter as evil. But they're an original creation of the movie, evil dead people whose primary motivation seems to be enjoying the pleasures of being alive. They represent a different kind of evil, a darker twist on the familiar, and their Irish folk music and dancing become a way of luring and tempting their victims in the name of universal and eternal togetherness, free of racism - only you have to be dead to achieve it. A haunting idea.
Then comes the traditional battle against the zombies and struggle of losing loved ones to evil ways. The provider of food at the joint, Smoke's former love, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), who is more connected to both religion and mystical folk potions and spells, now provides an emergency course in the lore about vampires, including how to combat them with sunlight, stakes, and the chewing and swallowing of garlic. There are horrific scenes of gore now when lovers are consumed and "turned" in the very act of love. There is a collective struggle as the Irish minstrels organize the evil ones on the outside and try to tempt those inside the juke joint to let them in or to come out to join their loved ones. Eventually the dawn comes and peace is restored, but many of the main characters are dead and Stack and Mary are vampires.
But perhaps, if you like quiet, unforgettable moments, the best is yet to come, where, underling Coogler's increasing formal playfulness, he appears to set up closing credits, when Stack and Mary return in 1992 Chicago, in Nineties regalia, to a club bar where sits the Old Sammie, who has just performed, immaculately dressed and holding a stiff drink in his hands. He is played by Buddy Guy, and the Chicago blues great, at their request, pulls out a guitar and sings one last unforgettable number, "Travelin'," which Young Sammie impressed Stack with in the car when they first met sixty years earlier. They share the truth that that time at the juke joint in Clarksdale was the best day of both their lives. Sammie chooses not to be "turned." He is ready to die.
That's not the end of the credits music you don't want to miss, because there is one final number back in 1932 before it all happens, when Young Sammie is at his father's church and beautifully sings "This Little Light of Mine," a more bluesy version of the gospel number we heard earlier sung by the congregation, but this time in a more bluesy version Sammie's reverend father would not approve of.
(Thanks for some of these details to the full summary provided by Eric Goldman on IGN.)
Unquestionably one of the best films of the year. Go out and see it if you can; and in around thirty-nine counties that is possible.
Sinners, 137 mins., has opened theatrically in many countries April 16, 17, and 18, 2025. Screened for this review at Cinemark Century Hilltop 16, Richmond, California. Metacritic rating: 84%.
