By the time “Sinners” closes out its first scene, any audience member should be leaning forward in their seats. By the end of the first reel, Coogler has you in the palm of his hand. After breathing life into the “Rocky” franchise with “Creed” and bringing Black Panther to the big screen twice, Coogler returns to original storytelling with a bang big enough to blow the bloody doors off any screen.
Michael B. Jordan, working with Coogler for the fifth time, plays dual roles here as twins Smoke and Stack. The brothers return to the Mississippi Delta after spending time in Chicago to buy up a sawmill and transform it into a juke joint. They rally a crew together and put on the party of a lifetime, but soon enough some supernatural bloodsuckers turn up, threatening to turn their night of celebration into a massacre.
Though “Creed” and the first “Black Panther” were potent entries in their respective franchises, Coogler’s return to original filmmaking is a joy to behold. His craft is honed from the last decade playing with house money, though under houses’ constraints. Firing on all cylinders and exploding with ambitious energy, he reminds us why we go to the movies with “Sinners.”
Propulsive and patient, “Sinners,” now in theaters everywhere, balances many seemingly discordant tones in its script with ease. It manages the high-wire act of making a cohesive film that embodies a sweeping period drama tackling a Jim Crow-era American South with just as much verve as a slick and sticky vampire rampage. Coogler has made two full-fledged stories inside one movie that never threaten to imbalance the other. In fact, they complement each other quite beautifully.
Marketed as a star-driven horror-thriller about some nasty vampires, it comes as little surprise that Coogler has once again managed to smuggle his endless personal fascinations into a cleanly packaged genre outing.
A majority of “Sinners” is directly preoccupied with the Mississippi Delta during the 1930s, a place and time often unseen on film, especially at this scale. The first 40-odd minutes luxuriate in this ornately realized setting, while the blues are revealed to be as vital to this film’s lifeblood as, well, blood. Music stands tall at the heart of the film, alive and beating with the rhythms of the blues, often crossing barriers of time. Ludwig Göransson’s score moves from acoustic to electric, evoking time and place alongside a soundtrack chock-full of original songs that sound ripped straight from the ‘30s in the best way.
Sin itself is given equal weight, though the film does not deign to become anything near a morality tale. Every character in the ensemble is burdened with sin including the aspirational musician Sammie (Miles Caton), scorned lover and friend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) and the drunk and unreliable but aspired-to musician Delta Slim (a scene-stealing Delroy Lindo), but they must all reckon with how much sin they’re willing to take on in order to keep going.
The scale of Coogler and his creative team’s canvas here is staggering. The team worked with a reported $90 million budget and IMAX 65mm cameras (“Sinners” is being screened on film, in IMAX 70mm and on 70mm, at two theaters here in the Bay Area out of fewer than 20 nationwide), alongside a rare deal where Coogler retained final cut, earns first-dollar gross and gets full rights to the movie after 25 years. Coogler has commanded the sort of A-list treatment that so few directors outside of your Christopher Nolans and Quentin Tarantinos are allotted. Given Coogler’s track record, it’s obvious to see how he got this deal, but what he and his collaborators deliver here is an improvement upon that track record.
This movie’s sweeping scope befits its early-on scene-setting, fully immersing its audience into the ‘30s through outstanding production and costume design from Hannah Beachler and Ruth E. Carter. Both designers re-team with Coogler after they won Oscars for “Black Panther.” Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw also returns from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” making history here as the first woman to shoot a studio picture with IMAX film cameras. This stellar craftsmanship continues to service the film through its unexpected endpoints, their bombastic conclusions better left unspoiled.
Around the midway point, Coogler rewrites the film’s visual and audio language in a barn burner of a scene that turns everything on its head. In this audacious sequence, he eases a rollicking period drama through a metamorphosis into a no-holds-barred heavy metal vampire flick. This sequence is ecstatic and daring, a vision of time’s translucence and a journey of turbulent ecstasy through music across centuries. This joy turns to fear, lighting the trail of gunpowder that turns the film into a keg ready to blow up and into an electric guitar-twinged, bloodthirsty disaster. How he balances these extremes is a mystery.
Those extremes punctuate the film’s rhythms. Pain and pleasure explode over and over again, violence and sexuality being portrayed just as in sync with each other as they contradict each other. A lesser director would cap a film of such extremes with a message of passivity or peace, how violence and sin cannot be the way, but Coogler understands that violence and beauty are not mutually exclusive, that the former often informs the latter.
By way of mining the history of this country’s sins through interpersonal dramas and through extremes only reached in gory genre fare, Coogler delivers big-screen bombast unlike most movies in the last few years by way of a rowdy crowd-pleaser that doesn’t dole out easy answers or arrive at any expected conclusion, but one that leaves a glorious fire in its wake. “Sinners” proves that sometimes the only way out is through.
