‘Sinners’ Review: Michael B. Jordan Doubles the Magnetism in Ryan Coogler’s Audacious Journey Into a Community’s Violated Soul

Ryan Coogler first turned heads with his 2013 debut Fruitvale Station, a shattering account of a fatal shooting that presaged the surge of the Black Lives Matter movement. He followed by successfully reinvigorating the wheezing Rocky franchise with Creed and went on to make what’s arguably the best of the MCU canon, Black Panther, plus an emotionally satisfying sequel that paid moving tribute to Chadwick Boseman. Sinners is the gifted writer-director’s first entirely original feature, not based on real-life events or existing IP, and he packs it with enough thematic layers and genre fluidity to fuel at least three movies.

Related Stories

Movies

Box Office: 'Sinners' Widens Lead Over 'Minecraft' With $48M in Surprise Easter Victory

Movies

Ryan Coogler and His Proximity Banner Are Playing the Long Game

There’s a lot going on here — an evocative portrait of life in the Jim Crow South; a pulpy explosion of vampire horror; a dynamic reflection on the spiritual and supernatural power of the blues; an allegory for the struggle for freedom, both earthbound and other-worldly. As much arthouse as grindhouse, it’s a blood-drenched mix tape that shouldn’t work. But it does, thanks to Coogler’s muscular direction, a terrific cast, enveloping IMAX visuals, body-quaking sound and music that stirs the soul while setting the pulse racing.

Coogler teams with regular leading man Michael B. Jordan, serving a double dose of cool but steely charisma as identical twin entrepreneurs known as Smoke and Stack. Having survived the WWI trenches and Chicago gangland, the brothers return after seven years to their Mississippi Delta hometown, Clarksdale, in 1932, flush with cash, a truckload of liquor and a plan to open a juke joint.

Nattily dressed in fancy big-city threads that stick out a mile in the dirt-poor, segregated plantation town, Smoke and Stack purchase a disused mill, its equipment and the land on which it stands from sweaty good old boy Hogwood (David Maldonado), warning him and his Klan buddies to stay off their property unless they want to be shot. “Shit, the Klan don’t exist no more,” smirks Hogwood. Yeah, right.

Coogler opens with traumatized sharecropper Sammie (impressive newcomer Miles Caton), smeared with blood and fresh claw marks gouged into the side of his face, staggering mid-service into the church where his father preaches, clutching his guitar. This is preceded by a voiceover recounting legends of music so true it can conjure spirits from the past and the future — piercing the veil between life and death, healing communities but also attracting evil. Illustrations of this mystical force are traced back to ancestral West Africa, pre-colonization Ireland and Choktaw tribal lore, which foreshadows the presence of all three cultures in the story.

It’s a safe bet that Sammie’s blues guitar and stirring vocals wield that transcendent power, something the pastor seems to intuit when he warns his son, “You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.” While the flashes of red-eyed, demonic faces tormenting the young man’s mind suggest the hell he narrowly escaped, Coogler is in no hurry to ratchet up the horror once the action jumps back to the previous day.

While business-minded Smoke heads to town to enlist the help of Chinese American grocer Bo Chow (Yao) and his wife Grace (Li Jun Li), happy-go-lucky Stack reconnects with their cousin Sammie, whose musical talents will help them inaugurate the juke joint that night. He also persuades legendary local harmonica and piano blues musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) to join them, offering unlimited Irish beer as an incentive, and hires burly sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Miller) away from the cotton field to serve as bouncer.

With brisk economy, Coogler introduces love interests for the three principal male characters. Sammie is instantly beguiled at the railway station by Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a young woman stuck in a loveless marriage and itching to sing the blues. Stack has an uncomfortable encounter with Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a well-heeled white woman with a husband in Arkansas, in town for her mother’s funeral. Her romantic history with Stack, who disappeared from her life, has left her with lingering rage, even if it hasn’t dulled her desire.

The most captivating of the three love stories is Smoke’s reunion with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a Hoodoo conjurer and Orisha spiritual healer who runs a small plantation store, where their infant son is buried outside under an oak tree. Though he has worn the talismanic Mojo bag she gave him on a string around his neck the whole time he’s been gone, Smoke claims he doesn’t believe in ghosts or demons, just power and the money that buys it. But their differences dissolve as Annie calls him by his name, Elijah, and their bodies melt into each other.

For a movie that will become a violent bloodbath, Sinners is unabashedly horny. It’s ripe with sensuality, which seems appropriate for a title you might expect to see splashed across a Jackie Collins novel.

That aspect extends into the sumptuous textures and saturated colors of Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s magnificent, big-canvas cinematography (the film was shot on both 65mm IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70); and even more so, into the flavorful music of Ludwig Göransson, with the score and the blues performances fusing together to intoxicating effect.

The film’s defining set-piece revolves around Sammie electrifying the opening-night juke crowd with the song “I Lied to You” (an original composition by Göransson and Raphael Saadiq). As the music soars, that life-death veil is pierced, crossing both metaphysical and temporal boundaries. The crowd jammed into the old mill are joined by West African ceremonial dancers and drummers, popping and locking hip-hop movers from the future, a deejay working turntables and a Rick James-style guitarist bedecked in sequins.

In just one transporting sequence that’s almost too much to take in, Coogler traces a line from the blues of the 1930s back to its origins and forward to its influences on funk and beyond. Sammie’s music even summons traditional Chinese dancers, awakening Americanized Bo and Grace’s cultural heritage.

That ecstatic communal experience is a glorious moment of freedom for oppressed people, most of them living hand-to-mouth in an environment of hatred and exploitation. But Sammie’s song also unwittingly beckons sinister interlopers all the way from North Carolina, bent on making that freedom short-lived.

Coogler doesn’t have the lightest of touches getting his message across about the violation of a community by supernatural forces echoed in the real-world history of the Deep South. But the vampires’ descent on the juke joint ups the suspense and becomes genuinely scary, at first with the unsettling charm of their ancient leader, Remmick (Jack O’Connell, chilling), and eventually the brutal carnage of their siege.

All that bloody mayhem is expertly teased in an earlier scene in which Remmick — exposed to daylight, bloodied and sweating smoke — knocks on a farmhouse door, asking for shelter from the couple who live there, Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke). (The reason singers are cast in those roles becomes clear before long.) A Choktaw posse shows up chasing the runaway and their spokesman (Nathaniel Arcand) warns Joan: “He’s not what he seems.” But the warning comes too late.

In its wildest moments, Coogler’s film seems like a collision of Lovecraft Country with True Blood, though more obvious comparisons will likely be drawn to From Dusk Till Dawn. But unlike that 1996 Robert Rodriguez-Quentin Tarantino joint, Sinners isn’t winking at the audience from behind grotesque violence and droll B-movie tropes. Coogler has more serious things on his mind, which yield some truly disturbing images and ideas.

It’s unsettling to watch a crowd of newly undead revelers — the first to flee the juke joint when blood starts flowing — skipping in a circle around Remmick as he sings “Wild Mountain Thyme” and dances a little Irish jig. Just the sight of Black people mesmerized into dancing to some of the whitest music ever made gets under your skin. But what’s even creepier is Remmick’s invitation to the holdouts to join them, promising an escape from dehumanizing cruelty into a fellowship that offers an eternal life of freedom and enlightenment.

Jordan throws himself into his dual roles with authority, sly humor and effortlessly masculine physicality, shaded with the menace that might be expected of brothers rumored to have worked for Al Capone. Ruth E. Carter — whose painstakingly detailed period costumes throughout are superb — gives the twins distinct sartorial styles. Smoke favors a dapper gray three-piece suit and flat cap, while Stack, gold tooth caps glittering in his mouth, is more ostentatious in his burgundy fedora with matching tie and pocket square.

But Jordan also gives them contrasting energy and attitude, setting them apart even before they clash, and putting subtle building blocks into place to signal which one will be maniacally transformed and which one will keep hold of himself long enough to claim retribution.

Steinfeld makes Mary a slinky vixen, clearly chafing at the constraints of a numbing marriage and easy prey for a fate unconscionably revealed in the film’s trailer.

Of the small group trapped inside the juke, Lindo is in winning form as a boozy old-timer previously acquainted with the devil; Caton (a former backup singer for H.E.R.) is a legitimate discovery, vulnerable but also driven in his desire to put the “Preacher Boy” tag behind him and carve a life as a musician (he plays a mean resonator guitar); Lawson has the least satisfyingly developed character, but she makes up for it when Pearline sings, busting sultry moves and raising the temperature to a point where the whole place seems to reek of sex; and Li has strong moments as Grace, her survival instincts not quite in line with the others.

The real standout, however, is Nigerian British actress Mosaku, so memorable in another unconventional horror film, His House. Annie is soft and sweet with Smoke, the evidence of a love that goes way back written in her eyes. But she’s also tough, and no novice at dealing with “haints,” the Gullah term for evil spirits. She’s the first of them to recognize that the intruders are no ordinary haints but vampires and she’s quick-thinking enough to slow one of them down by tossing a jar of pickled garlic in his face.

It’s hard to say whether hardcore horror lovers will be fine waiting out Coogler’s patient scene-setting, his detailed attention to character and milieu, until the blood-letting starts — even if it then settles into nerve-rattling terror with plenty of gruesome payoff. The movie is smart horror, even poetic at times, with much to say about race and spiritual freedom. It’s not in the Jordan Peele league in terms of welding social commentary to bone-chilling fear. But Sinners is a unique experience, unlike anything either the director or Jordan has done before.

It’s also an exactingly crafted movie that demands to be seen on the biggest possible screen, with the loudest sound system. And stick around for an end credits surprise or two.