GENRE | From the South Till 'Sinners' – Michael B. Jordan Feels the Blues

"Y'all ready to sweat till y'all stink?"

Warner Bros. Pictures / Proximity Media

Frequent Scorsese/De Niro-style collaborators, writer/director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan, reteam in their ultra-sexy period vampire saga, Sinners. Set over the course of a single day and night in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi in the thick of the Jim Crow-era Deep South, the supernatural gothic horror fantasia harkens back to the influences of the period's Black culture of jazzy blues music (later appropriated by white musicians) in the aftermath of the First World War.

Jordan portrays the Cain and Abel-coded identical twin Chicago bootlegger gangster brothers and WWI veterans, Elijah "Smoke" and Elias "Stack" Moore, with the latter clearly being more prone to aggression and danger. As things slowly burn, the sophisticated setup recalls From Dusk Till Dawn's surprising vampiric turn with shades of The Thing alluded to. Jordan creates two wholly distinct personalities and physical performances mirroring the duality of man in the rest of the film. Coogler's stacked cast of Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, and Delroy Lindo elevates the superficially pulpy material referencing the Christian Church backlash to the blues as the "devil's music," leading to eternal damnation of the soul.

Allusions to heaven, hell, temptation, and salvation are all over Sinners as Coogler bakes ancestral themes of the Black historical experience into the arcs of the characters' struggles. Smoke and Stack plan a big blues nightclub opening night as an act of redemption and celebration of pure Black joy, as they know the Klan and other nefarious actors are destined to spoil their party. Their hard-earned freedom is fleeting, and they know it. Meanwhile, a gang of white supremacist Irish folk vampires led by O'Connell wants to literally consume these Black musicians and appropriate their artistic talent, despite sympathizing with their shared oppression.



Shot on a glorious combination of tall, large-format IMAX 15-perf 70mm and wide Ultra Panavision 70mm full-frame film cameras by talented cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, its visuals are a breathtaking expression of the Mississippi Delta (filmed in New Orleans). Coogler frames his horror adventure in stark detail while employing tricks of genre filmmaking to propel his ambitious tale forward with a stylish verve.

Regular collaborator and composer Ludwig Göransson (also an executive producer) works overtime in his embedding of classic-sounding Southern blues tunes and rhythms into the core of the film's immersive narrative, including a wondrously stunning extended montage sequence summarizing the entire history and evolution of Black music in surreal fashion. How the musicality escalates Sinners' action and violence in the third act culminates the otherwise vicious visuals into a sexy and thrilling endeavour.

Sinners is a blood-soaked cinematic allegory and tribute to post-WWI blues music and African-American culture in the South. Coogler is working at the highest levels of ambition and confidence, expressing his cultural influences and their eventual appropriation. It's a purposely messy but righteously authentic and celebratory experience as it uses vampiric lore to twist its themes of freedom through America's embedded history of oppression.


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