What’s It About
Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” enters its community of Black-led contemporary horror films by reimagining vampire mythology in 1930s Mississippi. Visually stunning and ideologically challenging, the film does not sew together its many intriguing ideas into a cohesive narrative. It’s basically about twin brothers Elijah/’Smoke’ and Elias/’Stack’ (acted magnificently by Michael B. Jordan), former WWI soldiers turned Chicago gangsters, who return to their hometown in Mississippi to open a juke joint. As the film unfolds, it transforms from a period piece of Black enterprise to a blood-splattering vampire thriller when Jack O’Connell’s menacing Remmick appears with his vampire cohorts. The movie is split into three different parts. First up, we see the twins coming back home with some weird issues following them from Chicago. Then, we check out how fast they throw together their juke joint and all the complicated relationships that come with it. Lastly, things take a wild turn into horror land when white vampires go after the place, mostly because they wanna steal the musical soul of this young prodigy. Coogler’s direction is at its best in isolated moments. A montage following the history of music from ancient Africa through the present is one of the year’s most visually stunning sequences. The practical effects of vampire attacks are scary, and forego CGI for traditional blood splatters and grisly prosthetics that will delight horror fans. The performances enhance the material all the way through. Jordan is believable as both brothers with nuanced differences in personality. Wunmi Mosaku gives a scene-stealing performance as a voice of reason in turbulent times. Li Jun Li demonstrates remarkable range, while veterans Delroy Lindo and Omar Miller offer rock-solid support. The soundtrack by Ludwig Göransson is notable, providing period verisimilitude along with a hint of supernatural disquiet. Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography captures the physical expanse of rural Mississippi in stark beauty and simultaneously suggests how this land’s wealth was built on the backs of exploited Black individuals. Yet despite its merits, “Sinners” is plagued by thematic inconstancy. The film introduces interesting ideas regarding cultural appropriation, religious constraints on Black liberation, and historical trauma but rarely, if ever, sees through these threads. The vampire attack sequence itself has moments where the characters are aggravatingly making illogical choices for the sake of plot advancement. The entire concept of the leads being twins is sorta wasted here. As opposed to other twin movies where the twins’ differences drive the plot, Smoke and Stack are more like two puzzle pieces rather than actually distinct characters with their own arcs. Hailee Steinfeld’s character vaguely suggests something larger about race relations, but let’s be real. She’s more of a love interest than anything. The vampires are truly frightening, but they toggle between being symbols of cultural appropriation and outright monsters. The movie has this über ambitious vibe that’s difficult to sell—maybe that’s why Warner Bros has this kinda confusing promo strategy. It’s not a typical vampire flick or just a straight historical drama, and it’s not just about Black musical heritage. It’s trying to do all three at the same time, and that means some amazing scenes that don’t quite add up. A post-credits scene (which appears fairly soon after the primary credits begin rolling) presents one of the film’s finest scenes, yet it also feels to some extent detached from the preceding. The attire in the scene is bordering on cartoonish, particularly for the woman, just preventing itself from becoming inadvertently amusing. I’m not calling “Sinners” a failure. Compared to utterly confusing films (like Coppola’s latest “Megalopolis”), Coogler’s movie holds up throughout the whole thing with a consistent quality. Each scene holds up on its own, and the film never loses its grip on its audience. The issue is not that Coogler had to “pick a lane” but that he had to do a better job of linking together the different lanes he decided to go down. The most remarkable thing about “Sinners” is how entertaining it continues to be even as the death toll rises. Coogler evidently was resolved to do something personal and significant and yet deliver genre excitement, and on those terms, he more or less achieves it. For viewers seeking a vampire film that responsibly engages with America’s racial history while delivering genuine frights, “Sinners” achieves despite its formal failings. It’s a movie about a director taking risks and experimenting, even when not all of them pay off. Imperfect as it is, it shows Coogler persisting as a director who engages with challenging material on his own terms.
OUR RATING – A MESSY VAMPIRE 7.5