Sinners

In just over a decade Sinners writer/director Ryan Coogler has become one of the most successful filmmakers in the world. Winning Sundance right out of the gate with 2013’s Fruitvale Station – a politically resonant true-life story that gave Michael B. Jordan his first leading role (they’ve now made five films together) – he immediately set his sights on Hollywood and promptly became the first Black filmmaker to direct a billion-dollar-grossing hit thanks to Black Panther (2018), a genuine cultural phenomenon and the first full-blown superhero film to be nominated for the best picture Oscar.

What’s been fascinating about Coogler’s meteoric rise, though, is the extent to which he’s preserved his own voice. The road from indies to blockbusters is littered with directors who either got a shot at the title and had nothing to say, or couldn’t find a way to break through the corporate doublethink of big budget filmmaking with their sensibilities intact. Not Coogler. His second film Creed revived the on-the-ropes Rocky franchise by slyly flipping its racial politics and reframing the mythology to emphasise the importance of Apollo Creed for an audience that had previously had to make do with watching the series’ thinly-veiled Muhammad Ali proxy get put in his place by Sylvester Stallone’s great white dope. 

His two Black Panther movies, meanwhile (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever came out in 2022), may have slotted smoothly into the increasingly convoluted Marvel Cinematic Universe, but Coogler made some bold choices for a franchise film, like introducing the first film’s villain (also played by Jordan) by having him justify robbing the British Museum with a pointed critique of colonialism. Or how about the way he drew on the legacy of Afrofuturism across both movies in his conception of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, which he posited not just as a tech-rich utopia, but one that has to shield its very existence to protect its culture, resources and people from – plus ça change – the plundering imperialist proclivities of the western world? In Coogler’s movies Black lives matter – and so do the way they’re presented and represented on screen. Alongside his contemporary Jordan Peele, he’s fundamentally transformed the way blockbusters can operate – no mean feat in such a risk-averse mainstream movie culture.

Which brings us to Sinners, his fifth movie, his fifth collaboration with Michael B. Jordan, and his first fully original film. Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932, it stars Jordan as twin brothers named Smoke and Stack, a couple of enterprising gangster siblings who’ve returned home after toiling away for seven years in Al Capone’s Chicago to open a juke joint in their home town with their aspiring blues musician cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton). We already know from the ominous opening scene – featuring subliminal flashbacks cut into the disturbing sight of a bloody Sammie returning to his father’s church, broken guitar in hand – that something terrible has happened. But as the movie unspools the calamities of the previous 24 hours, Coogler serves up an audacious period horror movie that embraces vampire lore and blues music and combines them into both a wildly entertaining ride and a sophisticated deconstruction of the legacy of slavery, one that exposes the rigged nature of the American Dream, not just in the era of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, but far beyond. 

Like zombies and body snatchers, vampires are a robust allegorical tool in this respect and they’ve had a small role in Black cinema too, giving blacklisted Shakespearean actor William Marshal employment in the campy yet politically-charged blaxploitation hits Blacula (1972) and Scream Blacula Scream (1973) and providing initial fuel for Marvel’s emergence as a cinematic juggernaut with the Wesley Snipes starring Blade trilogy (1998-2004). Here, Coogler uses vampirism as a metaphor for the racist institutions that seek to subjugate those they fear or can no longer control, either through violence or through the more insidious forces of appropriation. But it’s the deft way he links it to music and the birth of the blues that deepens and enriches the film, complicating obvious interpretations by making the lead vampire, Remmick (played by a malevolent Jack O’Connell), an Irish immigrant folk musician, one with his own history of oppression and a vision for an integrated society that’s as sinister sounding and soulless as the country blues classic Pick Poor Robin Clean we hear him playing. 

Indeed, we’re told early on that music is a kind of supernatural force that can simultaneously provide healing but also attract evil – and blues fans will no doubt note the Clarksdale setting as the location of the fabled crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in return for fame and fortune. But Coogler isn’t interested in simply regurgitating that particular legend, perhaps because this foundational myth in Black American music has already been thoroughly appropriated by Hollywood in the form of the Walter Hill film Crossroads (1986), which retold the story from the very white perspective of a blues-loving classical music student played by The Karate Kid’s Ralph Macchio and featured a soundtrack composed by Ry Cooder and White Snake’s Steve Vai. As a character says in Sinners, “White folks, they like the blues just fine. They just don’t like the people who make it.” In contrast, Coogler turns Sinners into a more complex exploration of the difficulty of carving out a little bit of freedom to exist on your own terms, a dream he articulates in the film’s most audacious moment when Sammie’s music makes good on the promise of the film’s opening voice-over declaration that music “can conjure spirits from the past and the future”, something he then brings full circle with an end credits cameo for blues legend Buddy Guy (and if you sit right through to the end, there’s a Marvel-style stinger). 

But don’t mistake this for some kind of elevated horror thesis in search of a movie. In interviews Coogler has been upfront about the influence of Robert Rodriguez’s Quentin Tarantino-scripted vampire film From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) on its bait-and-switch structure and has name-checked everything from Jeremy Saulnier’s punks-v-nazis siege film Green Room (2015) and the raptor attacks in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993) to the way Nicolas Roeg managed to balance intimacy, sex and horror in Don’t Look Now (1973) as reference points for Sinners. When it gets down to it, this is a full-tilt horror movie in which the presence of vampires raises the intriguing question of whether eternal damnation or eternal salvation is preferable when reality is already hell on earth. In the current moment, it feels like a movie designed to unnerve everyone. 

Alistair Harkness
Film Critic | The Scotsman/Scotland
April 2025