Review: Sinners

Sinners may not be the scariest horror movie I watched this year, but it is confidently the best.

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Ryan Coogler's Sinners is about a lot of things. It's about the power of music, generally, and the Blues tradition of the Mississippi Delta, specifically. It's about culture and cultural appropriation. It's about hugely complex topics like race and sex and religion. Least of all, it's about vampires, yet it is one of the best vampire movies I've ever seen. It is likely that you've at least heard about it by now, even if you haven't watched it yet, because it has become universally acclaimed by consumers and critics alike. That is a tremendously heartening thing to me, not because I love horror and Sinners is ostensibly a horror film, but because Sinners is original, thematically dense, and masterfully crafted. If its success influences studios to invest in more material that meets those criteria, then we all win as filmgoers.

Michael B. Jordan stars as twin gangsters in the post-prohibition South who open up a juke joint in their hometown of Clarksdale, MS. Every single performance in the movie is worthy of its own paragraph of praise, but, for all of our sakes, I'll reserve my acting analysis for the most worthy target, and that is undeniably Jordan. He has always had movie star charisma that makes him a magnetic leading man, but this is something different. Jordan fully inhabits brothers Smoke and Stack in a way that makes them completely distinct from each other yet unmistakably connected through genetics and shared experience. Do your remember the effusive praise that Armie Hammer received for his turn as the Winklevoss twins after appearing in like 5% of the scenes in The Social Network? I do, and I even sort of bought into it at the time, but it is comical to think of that in comparison to the performances of Michael B. Jordan in Sinners. The relationship of the twins is at the heart of the film, and their chemistry is off the charts, which is a crazy thing to type about two characters played by the same person. Coogler helpfully color codes Smoke and Stack to help us tell them apart, but it is honestly a moot point due to how effectively Jordan conveys them as two separate people.

As great as Jordan and the rest of the cast are, it is ultimately Coogler and his production team that are responsible for Sinners garnering so much positive attention. This is a movie that absolutely crackles with electricity. It is movie-making that reminds me of how I felt watching 70's Coppola or 90's Tarantino for the first time. I enjoy Creed and Black Panther quite a bit, but I'm not sure anyone knew that Coogler had something like this inside him. The direction and cinematography are tremendous, yet I am most impressed with the creativity involved in the story-telling. Coogler expertly mashes different genres, incorporates musical performances in exciting new ways, shifts aspect ratios to underscore the drama, and so on... all of it is elite filmmaking that we haven't seen done in this precise way before. The fact that it traffics in as many ideas as it does makes it even more impressive. If I'm honest, I don't know precisely what I am expected to make of the heady stew of concepts that are presented, but I love that I have been inspired to spend so much time thinking about it. The idea of assimilation is absolutely at the root of Coogler's vision, and I think that you could read that idea as a commentary on the music industry, on gentrification, or on colonialism. Maybe all three. Maybe something else entirely. What I keep going back to when I think about the assimilation allegory is the idea of a director who existed successfully within Disney's Marvel Cinematic Universe ecosystem, but had this type of non-formulaic storytelling ability bottled up and waiting to be unleashed. Regardless of how you apply the film's central theme to the many ancillary themes it presents, or to the meta story of Coogler's Hollywood journey as I have, you are sure to find something to chew on. Even if you don't care to engage in that type of analysis when you cozy up for a vampire movie in October, you can enjoy Sinners purely for the spectacle, the characters, the surprisingly moving story, and the irrepressible sense of wonder that only the best of cinema can provide.