The film “Sinners,” directed and produced by Ryan Coogler, is built around a singular scene that weaves together cultural threads into a tapestry vibrant enough to make your goosebumps pulse to the rhythm. The other scenes form a historically accurate bassline that the fantastical elements of the film harmonize with. The film follows two revered brothers who have returned to the Mississippi Delta with questionably attained money in their pockets and nothing but ambition in their hearts: they want to create a watering hole of blues music and dancing, in the form of a lucrative juke joint, to quench the dusty town’s thirst for pleasure. What they can’t anticipate are an encroaching group of vampires, with an equal thirst for blood. My appreciation for the 1930s–era setup of the film matches, or even exceeds, my appreciation for what I believe is its apex scene—but with limited space, I will focus on that scene to articulate succinctly why this film is worth experiencing.
The scene begins with the grand opening of the Smoke Stack twins’ (both played by Michael B. Jordan) juke joint. Gold-toothed Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) hammers the keys and the preacher’s son, Sammie (Miles Caton), also the twins’ cousin, emits a deep masculine wail. In the straining of his neck, and the beads of sweat on his forehead, his body reasserts his previous response to Pearline (Jayme Lawson), who called him a nice young man: “I ain’t always nice, and I ain’t that young either.” As his metal bottleneck slides down the neck of his hand-me-down steel guitar with practiced confidence and ripe energy, he embodies youthfulness, but also blues music as deep as his African roots (more on that later). He locks eyes with Pearline again, the only woman in the room that he wants, uncoincidentally a married lady. His voice is a current between them, easily overpowering the faltering emotions of her marriage, a unity recognized in the eyes of the same Jim Crow government that the characters fight to survive in. Thus, Pearline’s ultimate disregard for the laws of adultery is a nod to the restrictive system of authority that weighs on the characters throughout the film.
Throughout the juke joint scene, Sammie solidifies his departure from the church by envisioning his future as a blues artist in Chicago. In doing so—while still claiming the title “Preacher’s boy” to his community in the joint—he discovers a different kind of spirituality. This is tied to his music and sexuality, which free him from the repressive Christianity that white people believed would help “tame” disobedient slaves. The story is reminiscent of groundbreaking literary themes like those in James Baldwin’s “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” In both “Sinners” and Baldwin’s breakout novel, music and spirituality are conduits for a young Black boy’s sexual desire (Baldwin’s novel has more explicit themes of homosexuality), and through music and uninhibited sexuality, a new spirituality is forged. Sammie, however, reclaims Christianity and gospel music as he hits a note while pointing to the spark-filled sky.
The scene thunders on, roaring and licking at reality. Hallucinations start, and the physical boundaries of time and space that the building contains dissolve into smoke; we watch as the roof and walls of the joint are engulfed in fire. From in between the subdued colors of the tenant farmers’ attire burst bright dresses and loud shiny beads of African ancestors. An ’ 80s rocker clad in bright purple electrifies the air, a DJ spins neon acid waves from the corner and women twerk against a table. A dancer in traditional Chinese dress, seemingly in a solidarity-seeking directorial decision, jumps and turns around the caterers Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao). Sammie’s music, and the music of Black musicians before and after his time, call on a future vision to help escape an impossible present reality.
While his father, the preacher, warns him of dancing with the devil—presumably by continuing to sing and play his original music to make a name for himself—Sammie (portrayed by Buddy Guy in the last scene) cannot stop. Indeed, shortly after the juke joint scene, vampires do attempt to incorporate everyone into their hive-mind-like collective, which results in a loss of autonomy and individuality for almost all of the characters, but they never succeed in taking control of Sammie, which allows his music to remain, in a way, unappropriated. Another character who remains “unappropriated” by the vampires is Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a Hoodoo practitioner who is the reason for Sammie’s survival and the grounding force of wisdom for the entire juke joint amidst their plight. Annie alone accurately recognizes the evil and has the foresight not to invite the vampires into the joint.
Finally, Smoke and Stack have an intricate and electric banter that distinguishes them from each other through revealing the subtleties of the identical twins’ personalities. It is immediately ambitious when a movie uses one actor for two roles, even in this day and age. “Sinners” uses new technology combined with a modern-day film editing strategy called “dual role” for the brothers, in which the characters are edited into the same frame after separate takes. The extra work of filming the scene twice falls squarely on the broad shoulders of Jordan, and he handles the job with grace and charm.
Upon finishing “Sinners,” I was cocooned in a deep sense of reflective wonder about race relations, music and American history, but one question kept buzzing through the precarious atmosphere of thought: Why vampires? And why did Coogler have to make them capable of flight? My issue was not the on-the-nose metaphor—appropriation as the sucking of blood and the claiming of individual identity for the vampire collective—but more that flying vampires on the big screen, in my mind, are a corny TV show idea failing to resurrect the European Gothic, while everything else in the film cuts so deep. However, vampires are recognizable for many viewers, which helps the film remain legible.
Beyond my aesthetic distaste for the visual of flying vampires, I have no real qualms about the film as a whole, and certainly none about the casting—a collection of extremely attractive and talented actors and actresses await in the most meaningful mainstream movie I have seen in a long time.