Sinners slowly drops its period-drama trappings to become something much scarier.
One of the rarest and most exhilarating types of horror films is what I call the switch-flip, in which a straightforward drama or thriller transforms halfway through into a pure fright-fest. The original (and best) example is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho; Takashi Miike’s Audition also stands out, as does Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, which sees a pair of fugitive bank robbers suddenly trapped in a saloon full of vampires. The Rodriguez film in particular kept coming to mind as I watched the writer-director Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, another tale of vampires that slow-rolls its intentions. But when the switch flips and the whole picture becomes clear, so does the terrific scope of Coogler’s triumph.
That Sinners is a vampire movie is an open secret. Much of the advertising for the film establishes this premise, and Sinners itself begins with a prologue announcing that something supernatural is coming. But the script’s unhurried reveal took me aback: What starts as an intriguing period drama set in the Jim Crow–era South curdles into a chilling showdown. Coogler established himself, with Creed and his two Black Panther movies, as a filmmaker with propulsive, novel takes on franchise fare. The wiliness of Sinners, however, makes it perhaps his most exciting creation yet.
Sinners stars Coogler’s enduring collaborator Michael B. Jordan, who has appeared in all of his films, as identical twin brothers. Nicknamed “Smoke” and “Stack,” the men have returned home to the Mississippi Delta after several years of working for the mob in Chicago. Jordan plays each brother with subtle differences, a risky choice that demands a little extra attention from the audience: Smoke is a bit meaner and colder than his sibling, while Stack is quicker to flash a (still-threatening) smile. But they’re two gun-toting peas in a pod, muscling their way back into town after declaring Chicago to be “Mississippi with tall buildings.”
Smoke and Stack buy a disused mill on the outskirts of town from its despicably racist owner, then recruit friends old and new to help them convert it into a saloon. The linchpin of their effort is a talented young blues musician named Sammie Moore (played by Miles Caton, in his feature debut), whose showstopping singing and guitar-playing is the club’s opening-night centerpiece. His ability to communicate the difficulty of Black life in the Delta through music resonates with the patrons, a mix of sharecroppers and working-class locals. But Sammie isn’t just a great performer; he’s also key to the film’s ambitious concept—that Delta-blues music is so raw and generationally powerful that even vampires want to listen to it. They’re violent and soulless, but they’re nevertheless lovers of good songs.
Understanding how ridiculous this conceit might seem, Coogler devotes the movie’s biggest, strangest scene to selling us on it. He represents Sammie’s performance as so transporting that it opens doors to other times; dancers and musicians from the past and the future materialize on the dance floor around him in a metaphysical ballet. The scene is dizzying stuff that might sound corny on paper, but in Coogler’s hands, it’s cinematic alchemy. The emerging mélange of time-traveling multidisciplinary artists, entranced by the same tune, makes his point far more profoundly than any expository dialogue ever could.
But Sammie’s virtuosic playing also entices a coven of vampires to come by, and then gives them cause to capture him. The gang of bloodsuckers is led by Remmick (played by the flinty, alluring Jack O’Connell), who strikes a balance of beguiling and petrifying. Remmick and his pals gradually start to convince the bar’s patrons—a crowd of Black southerners in search of hope during a despairing period in American history—to join the campaign to make Sammie one of their own. After all, the vampires reason, what’s the appeal of a mortal existence in such a cruel world?
Coogler leaves a lot of that philosophical debate to the audience. Once Sinners snaps into full-on horror mode—with Smoke and Stack fighting through a cluster of undead beings to rescue their friends—the film itself has no time for such a heady question. Coogler has demonstrated a knack for building action sequences that stand out in an era of weightless CGI garbage; Sinners, which was photographed on the expansive IMAX film format, has a similarly impressive scale. But the gory, sinewy vampire combat is stunning for reasons beyond the crisp presentation: By the time the movie flips the switch to unveil itself as a Southern Gothic, the audience has become invested in the journeys of its characters—even those of the immortal ones. Sinners had me cheering for every thrill and spill, all while mulling the deeper concerns threaded through it.
