Original Sin

Spoilers ahead for the movie Sinners

Let me start this by saying that Sinners is a movie that almost everyone loves. The people I saw it with loved it. The audience around me loved it. Critics love it and movie goers love it. Substack loves it, I’ve seen glowing reviews everywhere.

Good.

I’m glad we have a black filmmaker making a blockbuster for black audiences that is blowing up, especially as it is a wholly original film (outside of obvious influences like From Dusk to Dawn). This is a film that presents ideas that will feel novel to a lot of white audiences and I think they are seeing it in droves.

Good.

Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan have worked together five times and they find a comfortable rhythm here. The entire cast is excellent, with Delroy Lindo having a late career highlight as drunken bluesman Delta Slim. Hailee Steinfeld is excellent as usual. Wunmi Mosaku, who I had only seen previously in Loki and heard in Scavengers Reign, had a star making turn as Annie.

Newcomer Miles Caton, a blues musician turned actor, is sure to get a lot of publicity for his performance as “Preacher Boy” Sammie Moore, a sharecropper son of a preacher man who plays music so well it pierces the veil between the living and the dead. So too will Li Jun Li as Grace Chow.

There wasn’t a bad performance in the film.

Coogler has a lot to say in this movie, about religion, white supremacy, cultural assimilation and the loop of being black in America. The film takes shots at the Irish slave false equivalency wielded clumsily by bigots looking for a reason to deny reparations for people white Americans enslaved and forced across the Atlantic Ocean to work and die for them.

That manifests in Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish Vampire who crashes the grand opening of twin brothers Smoke and Stack Moore (Jordan in both roles). They are back in 1932 Mississippi from Chicago, fresh off a heist with the reputation of being Capone’s men preceding them.

The movie gives us the rundown on their old crew, introducing everyone who will be at the juke joint before the sun sets and the vampire menace must be dealt with. There is a much lauded musical number about halfway through the movie that kicks off the “horror” aspect of the second half, where the veil is pierced and the Irish Vamp shows up with his Klu Klux Klan thralls in tow. It was entertaining, both cinematic and theatrical.

My excitement for this movie was full tilt and that hype machine might have gotten ahold of me a little too tight. I feel like a dissenter when I say that it was a good film, but it fell short of excellence for me. The writing had a tendency to handhold, using voiceovers or flashbacks to remind you why certain events are happening.

The horror element of the movie is also underwhelming, this is an action-comedy with a horror veneer. There’s nothing wrong with that and my own expectations were my undoing. I was expecting a southern gothic horror, a Deep South experience calling to mind Zora Neale Hurston. What I got was fun and funny, but unfocused.

Where the movie falters most for me is how it pulls back from the horrors. The horrors of the monsters and the horrors of humanity. It hints at horrors, tells us that people are bad but we never get to see their inhuman behavior. Most of the worst is implied, which makes the moments of catharsis less impactful for me.

That said, I am interested in seeing the film again with a better understanding of what I’m getting into. The movie has moments where it shines, red eyes flickering in the dark portending danger. A chaingang singalong. Fire transitioning into stars.

I saw the film in IMAX, but I think that brought little to the experience. The cinematography was solid but not awe inspiring. I was not moved by the musical numbers, outside of Preacher Boy’s song for his father. And Preacher Boy’s journey is central to the story, how he needs to live life to understand the truth of the blues.

By the film’s ending, I think most of the goals set out at the beginning are delivered. Preacher Boy’s story is tragic but rewarding and he finds what freedom means for him in a world that strips it away from him at every turn. The epilogue at the start of the credits is one of the highlights of the film, it ties everything together in a satisfying way.

I struggled with what to say about Sinners, because it is easy to fall into a hater machine when you swim against the currents of public opinion. I hope this movie continues its run as the top film for a while, it’s a beacon for change in an industry that has stagnated with sequelitis, super hero fatigue and lifeless live action remakes of animated films.

See it, if you get the chance.