“The devil’s music” is a phrase that has been weaponized about many genres – rock ‘n’ roll, jazz – throughout history. When Pastor Jedidiah (Saul Williams) uses the phrase to his son, Sammie (Miles Caton), he’s referring to the blues.
Given that “Sinners” – Ryan Coogler’s new vampire movie – opens with Sammie covered in blood, clutching a sharp, sawed-off guitar neck mighty close to his preacher father’s back while Jedidiah begs him to leave evil in the dust, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Coogler is setting up a story that rests on a confrontation between vampires (evil) and religion (good). As Sammie shakes and sobs in his father’s arms, we’re left wondering if he’ll be able to overcome whatever malevolent force has left him in such a state.
Except, that’s not quite where we’ll end up. “Sinners” does not have such an easy definition of good and evil, or even of freedom and repression – the typical map of which so many vampire stories have laid upon. A messy, sexy, grotesque extravaganza that feels as much like a southern gothic as it does a slasher, “Sinners” also has more complex ideas about liberation, particularly Black liberation and how the past and the future connect, than you might expect. While sometimes chaotic in its execution, with “Sinners,” Coogler has succeeded in sneaking profound ideas into a B-movie spectacular.
Set in the 1930s in rural Mississippi, after that harrowing opening scene, “Sinners” flashes back to the day prior. Sammie’s twin cousins, Smoke and Stack (both played by frequent Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan) are back in town – much to Sammie’s father’s chagrin. The twins are gangsters, back after years of trying to make it in Chicago, with plans to start anew. They enlist Sammie to help them open a club.
As the twins and Sammie recruit assistance from all over town, a white man named Remmick (Jack O’Connell) frantically beats down a white couple’s door at sunset, begging them to grant him entry into their home before a group of Native Americans tracks him down and kills him. When they finally agree, Remmick reveals his true nature – vampire, if you hadn’t guessed. He turns the couple, and, in search of fresh blood, the three set their sights on Smoke and Stack’s new club.
It takes “Sinners” quite a while to get to the vampires of it all, and sometimes the film’s pacing can feel less fluid than you might like. The flashback framing (a device that almost never works) takes the wind out of the movie’s sails every time Sammie is in danger – we know he makes it to the end, so there’s no real tension there. In trying to balance all of the film’s different tones, Coogler sometimes gives himself a little too much to chew on, and that chaos, although delightfully rollicking, isn’t always completely satisfying.
But that long, slow pace to the night of the club opening and subsequent vampire attack allows tension to grow, and allows us to luxuriate in the world that Coogler has brought to life. Filmed on location in Louisiana, sun and sweat permeate every frame, and Ludwig Göransson’s score – half a creaking, western acoustic, half electric choral madness – brings the landscape to life, whether it be an expansive cotton field or a dirty, dusty dance club.
What Sinners” does well is sit comfortably at a confluence of blockbuster filmmaking, B-movie sensibilities, and high artistic ideals. “Sinners” revels in the down and dirty of horror filmmaking – literally. There’s more talk about cunnilingus in this movie than any other new film of recent memory. During a sex scene between Stack and old flame Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, having the time of her life), she leans over him and slowly spits into his open mouth. Sharing of bodily fluids is an imperative for any vampire movie, and in “Sinners,” there’s sex, there’s blood and guts, but above all, there’s humor mixed up with all of that sensuality and gore.
During a doorway showdown between Smoke’s love interest Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) and a friend-recently-turned-vampire, the camera pivots to every onlooker’s horrified, skeptical face. When it gets Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a drunken blues musician, he almost looks giddy at the drama unfolding before him as he takes a deep swig from his flask – a reminder for the audience to loosen up a bit.
But as much as “Sinners” is thriving in that goopy, almost campy horror space, it’s also a thematic minefield. And music serves as the conduit for the majority of those themes. Before the opening scene with Sammie and his father, a prologue tells the story of mythical figures throughout history with the ability to connect their ancestors and descendants – all the world, really – through music. In one of the film’s best sequences, Sammie’s performance at the club transcends a singular musical moment to become a culmination of all that has come before and all that will be. Dancers from ancient cultures in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere make their way through the 1930s crowd, while a modern man suddenly appears next to Sammie to bolster his blues with the buzz of an electric guitar.
The euphoria of this sequence complicates the confrontation between Sammie and his father at the beginning of the film. But everything in “Sinners” is more complicated than you might initially believe. Historically, vampire stories have represented a rebellion against repression, and there certainly are aspects of that in “Sinners.” When making his pitch about why the humans inside the club should give into him, Remmick pointedly remarks how terrible life is for Black Americans in the Jim Crow south, and how vampirism doesn’t concern itself with the bigotry of humans. The white couple he initially recruited were KKK members, but now? They couldn’t care less about skin color – they’ve been freed from that particular, racist constraint.
He’s not wrong. But he is soulless. Therein lies the rub of “Sinners” – how do you hold onto your past, onto your culture, onto your identity, when confronted with the evil realities of the world you live in? How do you do all of that without becoming a soulless, bloodsucking monster?
Interestingly, music plays as big a part in the vampire’s culture as it does in the lives of the humans they crave. Remmick galvanizes his growing horde with Irish music and dance, and his interest in Sammie comes from the perceived power of Sammie’s musical ability. He desires to not only take Sammie’s music for his own (“I want your music,” he growls at one point, “I want your stories.”), but to use it to reunite with his own heritage, something he has been robbed of after decades of living as a leech. Remmick remembers, but the world forgets. There’s an immigration and assimilation narrative here, as well as an appropriation one. People (and vampires) enact the same horrors onto one another that were enacted onto them in some twisted, bizarre form of rectification.
Despite Sammie’s father’s belief that music of the non-church variety is the work of the devil, religion in “Sinners” is not so diametrically opposed to vampirism as he might hope (proved in hauntingly funny scene where a bunch of vampires robotically repeat the Lord’s Prayer). Instead, cultural preservation becomes the true savior, stories and art passed down and shared from one generation to the next. Vampirism may represent a certain type of freedom, but it robs us of the cultural connection we all crave. It robs us of what makes us human.
