Blood Rites
By Kelli Weston
Sinners
Dir. Ryan Coogler, U.S., Warner Bros.
Clarksdale lies on the banks of the Sunflower River, at the northern end of the Mississippi Delta where the rambling floodplains—distinct from the prairies and hills that dominate much of the state’s landscape—sprawl toward Memphis. Historically, the Delta was noted for its fertile soil and heavy cotton production, which made it one of the wealthiest regions in the country during those miserable, bloody centuries before the Civil War. Not incidentally, Clarksdale is best known today as the birthplace of the blues, for this soil also delivered the likes of Muddy Waters, Son House, Willie Brown, John Lee and Earl Hooker, Sam Cooke, and Robert Johnson, who famously “sold his soul to the devil” at the crossroads in exchange for success on the guitar. (Reverent musicians pay their respects at the intersection of Highway 61 and Highway 49.) It seems almost eerie for one place to contain so much legacy. Clarksdale is also where Bessie Smith, the veritable “Empress of the Blues,” died in 1937. Many of these artists would leave this world young. Indeed, the ghosts that haunt the Delta—their names immortal altars in the mouths of the living—bear the most terrible stories.
Ryan Coogler locates his vampire action thriller (and sometime musical) Sinners in Clarksdale, circa 1932, where he ambitiously retraces this inheritance: the emotional and spiritual genesis of the blues, Black folklore and its attendant mysteries, the South’s much overlooked ethnic diversity and cadent medley, capitalism’s infectious violence, etc. A chamber piece set across a fateful 24 hours, the film reunites Coogler for the sixth time with his muse and creative partner Michael B. Jordan: the actor has appeared in each of Coogler’s five features to date, and Coogler produced Jordan’s 2023 directorial debut Creed III. Here Jordan plays twins Smoke (née Elijah) and Stack (Elias) Moore, World War I veterans and former associates of Capone—let us not dwell on this detail’s plausibility—fleeing the glamorous menace of Chicago without quite shedding the volatile propensities they cultivated there. (Smoke shoots two men who dare to peek into his truck.) Clad in swanky three-piece suits, the brothers have at least materially availed themselves of the city’s promise, a far cry from their sharecropping origins. (Before we discern the composed negotiator Smoke from the brazen, loquacious Stack, the latter is distinguished by his burgundy fedora and the gold basket crown on his front incisor; Smoke modestly dons a blue pageboy cap.) We find they have returned to their hometown, after some undisclosed trouble, with a considerable amount of cash to start a juke joint.
With these mysteriously acquired funds, the brothers purchase an old sawmill and spend much of the day corralling old friends to animate their dream citadel—christened “Club Juke”—by nightfall. The recruited include their 19-year-old cousin Sammie (Miles Caton in a star-making debut), a preacher’s son with a silky baritone, and Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a charming bluesman with a fondness for liquor, as the entertainment; Southern Chinese grocery shop owners Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo Chow (Yao) to provide the food and print the signs and menu; conjure woman Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s estranged wife (still grieving, like Smoke, the loss of their infant daughter), to cook the food; and sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) to man the door. They encounter one or two snares along the way, none more perilous than Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), their white childhood friend and Stack’s former lover who insists upon rekindling their relationship. But for a few hours—before the twins realize their gamble will almost certainly amount to a loss, before they discover something far more sinister awaits them in the dark—Club Juke is a success in the only way that matters: they have built something with (and for) the people who know and love them best.
Sinners takes its time building the supernatural dimensions of its tale. The epigraph, narrated by Annie, mentions that some figures are so musically gifted they can raise spirits, malignant or otherwise. Some version of this concept must exist in most cultures, but certainly the haunted, ancestor-worshipping Black South could not fail to appreciate its weight. The film proposes that Sammie, with his sublime melodies, unwittingly summons the charismatic Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell), who infects a pair of neighboring white supremacists that he enlists to sour festivities at the juke joint. The Black Southern Gothic literary tradition has generally seemed less solicitous of the vampire narrative, although the figure intuitively invites racial translation: the migrating Other, burdened with sexual projections, tasked to embody inchoate anxieties that wed blood and ethnic difference. Unlike ghosts, they are flesh, determinedly corporeal. Annie describes their condition as a “curse,” for “the soul gets stuck in the body”—a perverse state—alienated from the ancestors. Birth and death are bound up in the vampire, which make it peculiarly obliging for certain Christian symbolism. The most obvious cinematic examples, Blacula (1972) and Ganja & Hess (1973), stage these religious, colonial, and sexual conflicts. But one can sense Coogler’s disinterest in harnessing more out of the trope. He doesn’t seek to reinvent vampire mythos so much as affirm the inclinations of a naturally superstitious people with a healthy respect for the dead.
The filmmaker presses the vampire into ideological service, building on his own nodalproject: the intersection of dialogues between marginalized peoples with different ideas about redress. This works better in some films than others. In Black Panther (2018)—by some distance, the best of Marvel’s output, in sheer craft (and care) alone—this took the shape of an Afro-diasporic exchange that gave voice to a long overlooked heartache and righteous rage, expressed by Jordan’s embittered Erik Killmonger, who represented a broader monstrous fracture. It works less well in Wakanda Forever (2022), where the principal conflict between the Indigenous and African tribes conveniently never endangers the Western neo-colonialists, who remain largely marginal in the lead characters’ parallel quests for vengeance. In Sinners, Remmick recalls his own family’s oppression and offers his infected the seemingly anodyne proposition of a shared consciousness: to blend their stories and music together. In one striking musical sequence, he leads his bloodthirsty brood, Black and white, in a stirring, haunting rendition of “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” a liturgy of assimilation. (Jayme Lawson as Pearline, Sammie’s lover, easily wields the most electric musical number in a film brimming with them.) Annie’s prologue again proves instructive, linking various castes of storytellers—including the Irish Filí and the West African griot—who are not just (or even primarily) musicians, as the film suggests, but principally historians.
If the vampire lore in Sinners does not quite cohere, a more compelling pattern unfolds. Coogler seems to recycle a premise he first staged in Black Panther: that no one who embraces the American project may escape its grotesque transformations. This was Killmonger’s true war—though he could not see it—that he had been deformed by his American appetites, his entitlement, greed, and propensity to destroy. This, too, becomes what Sammie ultimately resists, to surrender to these (literal) bloody “appetites." Remmick mirrors the teenager’s pastor father in a climatic “baptism” scene, reciting the “Lord’s Prayer” even as he rejects its principles: an unsubtle metaphor perhaps, but yet to outlive its horror.
What each of these films—and Creed (2015) before it—demonstrate best are Coogler’s scale of vision, his populist impulses, and proclivity for grandiose portraiture. In addition to Jordan, the filmmaker also reteams with regular collaborators, DP Autumn Durald Arkapaw and his USC classmate, wunderkind composer Ludwig Göransson, now boasting two Academy Awards (for Black Panther and 2024’s Oppenheimer). Coogler has always been an aesthetically bold director, scrupulous in conjuring textured, regal worlds on screen. Arkapaw’s lavish compositions, shot on film and IMAX, and Göransson’s plaintive, soulful score, steered heavily by the guitar and blues-inspired chords, breathe dimensional sensuality into a supremely carnal film. We find, too, hungry glimpses everywhere of the kind of experimentation the director has been denied since, perhaps, his debut Fruitvale Station (2013). In one stylish set piece, Sammie’s mournful ballad alchemizes into a futuristic chorus, charting a path from the thirties to the seventies’ electric soul and onward to nineties hip hop (a genre that casts its gaze back more often than it is given credit for). Such a heartfelt signature guides Sinners to its winsome, satisfying conclusion (followed by two post-credits sequences), devoted to the miracle of growing old.
His screenplay is a little less sleek. The first act is laden with exposition, and there are a few too many characters. The latter is especially regrettable with such a magnetic cast: Mosaku—always the best part of any production she graces—Lawson, and Lindo all shine in what seems a fleeting, too divided amount of screen time. But whatever disjointedness exists in Coogler’s films are always neutralized by the vivid sense of revel in Black fellowship; his fastidious attention to our celebrations and rituals injects his cinema with a felt dynamism—for he clearly believes in this magic himself.