Sinners

 Sinners (2025) is an extraordinarily ambitious vampire film. The movie doesn't use vampires as an allegory for anything and there's no facile message or socio-political theme.  Rather, the picture explores with mysterious depth the question of what is important in life, what are the values that make life worth living.  Darkness surrounds us.  How should we act to overcome this darkness or, at least, make meaning from it?  Ryan Coogler's film is only incidentally a horror picture.  Horror here signifies the misery of oppression and cruelty but the strength of the film is that the Sinners is too rich and subtle, too complex, to attribute to any of its elements (including the garish and gory vampire theme) any single meaning or even constellation of meanings.  We have to consider the film as a whole and accept the fact that certain aspects of the picture seem meaningful, and, even, profound, but resist any unambiguous interpretation.  As an example, the vampires, at first, seem to embody aspects of the poor White trash experience.  So are we to conclude that the downtrodden Black sharecroppers who represent the community under attack in the film are the victims of White racism, here identified with vampirism?  This interpretation can't be sustained.  In fact, the vampires seem to have their own peculiar culture with its own odd rituals and folk music -- the vampires favor Scotch-Irish folk songs and seem to indulge in weird choreography that looks like zombies imitating Irish step-dancers.  And the vampires, who originate in some kind of Choctaw Indian sorcery, make an odd appeal to the Black sharecroppers -- "join us," they proclaim, "and we will all be completely equal", in fact, a sort of desegregated "beloved community".  It's impossible to rationally interpret these features in the film -- but, nonetheless, the movie is all of a piece and has the crazy integrity of a nightmare.  

Sinners has a prelude and epilogue with its narrative divided into three principal blocks of action.  In the prelude, a preacher's son stumbles into a Sunday service at a rural Black church.  The young man is wounded, carrying the neck of a wrecked guitar, and his face has been scratched, gouged open as if by a panther's claw.  The children in the church are singing "This Little Light of Mine / I'm gonna let it shine" and the preacher pleads with his son to abandon the devil's music, the Blues, and come back to the Church.  The film, then, flashes back one day, to the preceding Saturday afternoon.  Two handsome Black hustlers have come to the small town of Clarksdale in northern Mississippi (the birthplace of a number of Blues luminaries, including Sam Cooke, Ike Turner, Muddy Waters and many others).  It's 1932 and two men, twin brothers, are Chicago gangsters and World War One veterans who have returned to their hometown to set up a business.  Smoke and Stack, as the gangsters are named, are snappy dressers, obviously armed, and they aren't cowed by the local Ku Klux Klan.  In fact, they buy an abandoned mill from the head of the local Klan, threaten the White bigots with violence if they trespass on the property (everyone in this movie including the undead are intensely territorial), and, then, recruit local sharecroppers to staff the Juke Joint that the intend to operate out of the building.  The first third of the narrative has something of the character of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai -- the main thrust of the action is recruiting musicians, doormen, and cooks for the juke joint.  We observe Smoke and Stack interacting with various folks and persuading them to attend the opening night at the Juke joint -- it's an exercise in building a team.  Sammie, Smoke and Stack's cousin, is an accomplished Blues guitarists (he's the mutilated figure in the opening scene) and he agrees to perform at the joint.  Pearline, an attractive Octoroon (who can pass for White) joins the venture as a singer.  Cornbread, a field worker, says he will work as a bouncer and doorman.  Delta Slim, an alcoholic musician, agrees to play piano and mouth-organ in the joint.  A Chinese merchant and his wife also join the team and Annie, Smoke's estranged and embittered wife, is recruited to cook for the customers of the joint --she fries up huge batches of catfish. (Smoke and his wife had a baby daughter, but the child's death drove a wedge between them and, apparently, led to Smoke abandoning her and going to Chicago; Smoke's wife is a "conjure woman" who traffics in herbs and knows supernatural lore.)  The scenes involving Smoke and Stack gathering their forces are lovingly detailed and written in a very pungent Mississippi delta patois.  A White boy from the North (such as this writer) may need subtitles to understand some of the dialogue. (Smoke and Stack are played by the same actor Michael B. Jordan).  Coogler's direction is self-assured --like John Ford or Kurosawa, he's in no hurry to get to the bloody action and this part of the film betrays little evidence of the genre horror elements that will dominate the last third of the movie.  There are a couple short and enigmatic scenes establishing that the vampires have attacked some Irish immigrants and, apparently, converted them into monsters -- but this aspect of the film seems only incidental to the warm and compelling scenes that establish the community.  

The second part of the film details opening night at the juke joint.  Sammie plays a blues song that somehow summons the spirits of Black musicians (and other performers) from the past and future to the bar.  We see African griots and hip-hop artists and someone who looks like George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic mingling with the dancers. (Performers from Chinese classical opera also magically appear.)  The music seems to hypnotize everyone and, in this bravura sequence, the joint is blown apart, its walls burning down and its ceiling exploding upwards in glowing embers.  Suddenly, everyone is simply dancing in the ruins of the juke joint -- it's a sort of hallucination but an effective dramatization of the power of the music.  Music in this film -- and the picture can be construed as a musical -- has the same ecstatic effect that we observe in David Lynch films:  it induces weird trances in people and strange visions.  In the third part of the movie, the vampires attack the fragile, but tight community formed among the folks at the juke joint.  The film strictly observes certain rules:  the vampires can't enter a house or building unless they are invited over the threshold -- this leads to long colloquies at the doors leading into the juke joint.  The undead can be killed by driving wooden takes through their hearts.  Their bites turn victims into vampires and the monsters are afraid of garlic which scars and burns them like acid.  Sunlight, of course, turns them into (in)human torches. (The fight with the vampires summons to mind Robert Rodriquez's  truckstop and brothel from hell in his vampire picture From Dusk to Dawn, featuring Quentin Tarantino who produced the picture.). Ultimately, the embattled people in the juke joint determine that, unless they kill the vampires, the undead will invade Clarksdale and kill everyone there, transforming the whole population into a ravening mob of monsters.  So, the survivors in the mill open the doors and invite the vampires into the structure for a final apocalyptic battle -- this scene is redolent of The Seven Samurai's last battle scene in which the bandits are lured into the village in a rainstorm to be slaughtered.  There's an unnecessary and distracting coda to the big fight in the mill.  The local Ku Klux Klan appear at the mill to take it back from its Black proprietors.  Smoke, one of the few survivors of the fight with the vampires, removes a couple of big machine guns from a wooden box, ambushes the Ku Klux Klansmen and massacres them.  The film's epilogue takes place in 1992.  Buddy Guy plays the role of Sammie, now an ancient Blues-man  performing in Chicago bar called Pearlines.  The old man is visited by the undead Smoke and his moll, Pearline, also now an immortal vampire.  These scenes are extremely moving and import into the film an almost Proustian resonance.  

Coogler's is not a particularly skilled director of action sequences.  The vampire attacks are scary but prosaic.  The final slaughter of the Ku Klux Klansmen seems unmotivated -- after all, these bad guys haven't really had any role in the movie -- and the carnage is poorly choreographed and confusing.  Coogler excels with syncopated cross-cutting between various strands of simultaneous action and directing actors in group and dialogue scenes that have considerable dramatic force.  When a vampire suddenly takes flight, leaping like a Chinese acrobat high into the air, Coogler cuts to frenetic dancing in the juke joint.  The film's design is taut and convincing and the scene-setting is extremely effective.  The camerawork conveys the heat and sweaty confinement of the ramshackle juke joint.  The skies are decorated with cauliflower-shaped storm clouds and the thickets around the juke joint flare with the red eyes of hiding vampires.  The dusty delta roads and the corn fields and the little village and shacks are all lovingly portrayed in a sort of honey sepia light.  The movie is far from flawless but its bold and has the courage of its convictions.  

(I went to see Sinners in Rochester at the Chateaux Theater on the north side of town.  The picture was projected in a calamitously dim print -- the faces of the Black performers faded into darkness and you couldn't see their expression and the midday vistas of the cotton fields had a faded denim tint, dull bluish colors under a dull green sky.  I talked to a couple of the other people in the audience but they didn't seem particularly concerned.  The other people in the theater were all young and accustomed, I suppose, to watch pictures on the format of their cell-phones and so the clarity of the image didn't really matter to them.  I went into the lobby and complained to the manager.  She returned to the theater with me and agreed that the projection was far too dim.  "We have to replace a light bulb in the projector," she said.  We agreed with her not to restart the movie but just pick up with it in progress after the bulb was replaced.  After eight minutes, the movie resumed about 15% brighter than it had been earlier -- nonetheless, the movie was shown at only about 40% of the brightness that I think was intended.  This experience reminds me that most movies look better on my TV at home than in the theater where they are indifferently projected without any real concern for how the image looks on the screen.  What was done to Sinners amounted to sheer vandalism.  I conclude to my dismay that it's pointless to see movies in theaters -- first, it's fantastically expensive:  the ticket was $14.83 for one admission and the concession featured 9 dollar fountain pop and 25 dollar popcorn; second, the theater experience is unpleasant if the movie isn't projected with proper brightness or concern for the integrity of the image.  The theater industry seems to me to be completely collapsing and no one, apparently, knows how to properly show these films.  This grieves me since I used to like attending movies and have enjoyed going to the theater all my life.)