Preamble

Is it weird that I’m having writer’s block over this particular preamble? All there really is to say is that this is my first post about a film in yonks and that I’ve been relishing the prospect of a blank page again. With that said, have you seen Sinners? Let me know in the comments below.

Brief Consideration

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is full of life. It bursts at the seams with community spirit, kinship and a rare reckless abandon, that’s usually reserved for vampiric antagonists in other genre pictures.

On the surface, it’s story of twin brothers, Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) returning to rural Mississippi to open a juke bar has echos of From Dusk Till Dawn.

However, unlike that film, it’s screenplay enlivens its supernatural tropes with a cultural and racial dimension. For one, the vampires absorb music and culture as a form of preservation. But because they’ve not had a lived experience of it, they can be seen as appropriating it as a form of seduction to entice future victims. As the leader of supernatural clan says to a young blues singer in the third act- “We want your music and stories.”

Even the typical convention of vampires requiring invitation to enter an establishment has racial tension. This is evident in a prolonged scene where the white vampire clan demand entry into the brothers’ bar. Along with an insert shot of KKK garb and the clan having a subtle presence, results in the racial disenchantment simmer with wily power.

Coogler’s camera work in the Black Panther movies often made my eyes roll with its quality of drawing too much attention to itself. But in Sinners, it’s ambitious and engrossing. In particular, his long takes depict such a lived in quality that I could not help but feel like a passer-by. And in the sharp cross cutting, Coogler and editor Michael P. Shawver achieve a raw passion that’s animalistic in its carnal power.

In this way, Sinners makes us feel what the central creatures can’t, the lingering of the sights and senses of our youth that we carry with us to the grave.