Starring Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku

Written & Directed by Ryan Coogler

Warner Bros, in Cinemas now

Having survived the First World War, and running for Capone in gangland Chicago, twin brothers return to their Mississippi hometown to start again and set up a Juke Joint, only to discover that an even greater evil is waiting to welcome them back.

Sinners is a movie about many things; on the surface it’s about vampires and Jim Crow and plantations and oppression and music and faith and the KKK. It’s about segregation and power and what it means to be Black in America today.

It’s shot beautifully with gorgeous use of colour, framing and with masterful composition on a set that is deceptively simply put together.

And the soundscape; the music. It has my favourite dance scene in anything of all time.

In all of this it’s a masterclass in how to build a well-paced film that looks gorgeous and delivers the thrills.

However. It’s not really about any of that. It is, at its most basic level, about predators. There are predators in almost every scene from the opening. Whether it’s Smoke/Stack returning from Chicago (notoriously set during Capone’s rule and slap bang in the middle of Prohibition) where they were clearly running with the mob to the moment they buy their juke joint from a White landowner to the pursuit of a literally smoking man by Choctaw hunters through to the meat of the film, its ending and its coda of an epilogue; predators run through this film’s every scene.

In this the story is about a specific time and place – the Mississippi Delta in 1932 – but it’s also about how humans predate on each other for power, for satisfaction and for control. It is about the racial politics of this time and place but as a lens that looks back, that includes other times and places whose threads make this time and place possible. It’s also about the threads that lead out from this time and place into the future, into our now and whose legacies make our time possible.

It’s about how too many things never change, how too often freedom is compromised by power, by greed, by hate, by humanity. I don’t mean freedom in the repulsive libertarian sense, no, I mean the simple freedom to be yourself among your people without persecution or fear of the powerful and from those who’d rather control you or erase you.

It pulls on threads from three key precursor cultures all of whom were wrecked by English speaking White power fantasies – Ireland, Indigenous Americans and West Africans – and then spools them into a tapestry about Black Americans in the Deep South during the period when the supposed gains of emancipation have clearly been rolled back and undone after the abject failure of Reconstruction. It is a bitter time for our characters. The presence of these cultures haunts the film in ways that I will need to watch again to appreciate more fully.

Most importantly of all though is that this isn’t a film about suffering but one about joy and about fighting for the kind of world we want. It’s a film about family and community and about how we survive under pressures that should distort us, should make us cower.

It’s about memory and how the sins of the fathers track us through history. It’s about how our choices now, even the smallest ones, can turn the world where we are for good and for bad.

Coogler has written something extraordinary. Ludwig Göransson has scored something even more so.

All of this is before we get to three key scenes that I think will be dissected by film makers for years to come. One is about music and its power to bring us together, to transcend time and space and culture; one is about religion and how we use it to justify our sins but also how its promises drive us, the hope it gives leading us up and down to highs and lows. The last is about power and hatred, about resistance and what that means – both its costs and its rewards.

The first – music – is a scene in which Sammy, played by Miles Caton, sings and plays. Having already demonstrated his stunning talents earlier in the film, we see here a scene that flaws us, the viewer, with its audacity, its punch, its hope, its wonder. I turned to my companion during it and said, ‘if I see nothing more of this movie it won’t matter’.

The second is a murder framed as a baptism, the threads of faith winding through it, and how this justifies both atrocities and hope at the very same time. Adopted faith, abandoned faith, it doesn’t matter because the nature of belief, its consolations, its desolations; all of them sit here in this scene and demand we dwell on just what the power of faith means to us and to the predators of this film – be they vampires or gangsters or the KKK.

The third is a battle between one man and a whole cadre of white Christian nationalists, aka the KKK. It’s about him resisting his enemy, those who would steal and kill because they can, because they feel they’re justified and that their cruelty is not only alright but should be a feature of their behaviour. In this time when many people debate how to resist fascism, the resistance here is a lesson – no resistance is without cost and if you think you’re resisting and it’s not costing you then, honestly, you aren’t resisting, you’re occupying a space that’s been made to sideline you (at best).

But it also talks about the hope of that resistance, that the enemy can be defeated. It’s a tough moment but one that’s full of hope.

There are other things in here: nods to the role of Chinese immigrants in the USA, differing ways of understanding time, even the truth that some kinds of evil seem to be recognised across cultures – not least the evil of unfettered predators who kill for the sake of it. Sinners is clear eyed; not one of the predators on the screen is anything but that which they are but not all of them prey on their victims for the same reasons and that is vital to understand. Having said that, in the end Sinners reminds us that predators will justify their actions with whatever words they feel make sense in the context in which they find themselves. We must always be ready to stand against their arguments.

Then there’s the importance of twins in numerous West African belief systems. Whether they’re seen as gods to be venerated or suspect spiritual powers to be eradicated, the use of them here in Sinners is not accidental and nor is it simply a dramatic device – it’s there at the heart of the drama and the presence of twins goes to the heart of the story and how we experience the world around us.

Verdict: I feel like I’ve said a lot and haven’t said very much. Thing is, I’m going to go see it again and suspect I’ll have more to say afterwards.

What I do know is this film should blow you away.

10 guitars out of 10

Stewart Hotston

Legend has it that the great blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a Mississippi crossroads in return for instrumental prowess and lifelong success, only to die mysteriously aged just 27. While Ryan Coogler’s astonishing new vampire horror, Sinners, isn’t telling that story specifically, it’s a potent mythology that’s clearly written into the film’s DNA.

For the first full hour of the movie, you might be forgiven for thinking that you’ve wandered into the wrong screen at the multiplex. The story unfolds as a purely naturalistic, beautifully rendered tale of hardworking Mississippi sharecropper folk. It’s 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression and twin brothers Smoke (Michael B. Jordan) and Stack (also Michael B. Jordan), distinguishable only by red and blue adornments to their natty attire, have returned from war and northern criminality to set up business running a Juke Joint in an old saw mill they buy from a racist landowner with their admittedly ill-gotten Chicago gains.

They’ve got great plans for the place, recruiting their young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) to sing and play guitar. He’s the son of a preacher who fears that if Sammie pursues his ambition, the devil will come for him sooner or later, but the young blues picker refuses to give up on this once in a life time opportunity. Students of blues mythology will note that he’s exactly the age Robert Johnson was in 1932. Along the way Smoke and Sammie pick up a hard-drinking old piano player, Delta Slim (in a screen-owning performance by the wonderful Delroy Lindo) and a singer, Pearline (Jayme Lawson), who has eyes on the young guitar player. Throw into the mix Smoke’s ex, Mary, who is assumed to be white but had one black great-grandparent, and Stack’s estranged wife Annie whose knowledge of the occult has branded her a witch by some in the community.

The film takes its time, but the visuals are so sumptuous and the characterisations so delicately played it’s never boring and I found myself lulled into something of a false sense of security, even if I was wondering if the vampire stuff promised by the trailer was ever going to kick off. It’s an extremely bold move to test a horror audience’s patience in this way, but Coogler wants us to believe in this world, and to care about his characters beyond seeing them simply as vampire fodder for the final reel. He has something to say. He doesn’t just want you to spill your popcorn.

But when it kicks off, boy does it kick off. Yes, there are vampires, albeit the most leftfield vampires I can remember – led by British actor Jack O’Connell equipped with a banjo – but there’s a whole barrel-load of other stuff going on as well. At the point the movie abandons the naturalistic patina of its first half, not only do the fangs come out, but Coogler takes us on a magical realist journey into the evils of cultural appropriation and ethnic assimilation, which is part PhD, part folk horror, but ultimately eye-popping spatter with a surreal dollop of acridly funny cultural satire for good measure. This is a movie that manages to be both hugely entertaining but startlingly intelligent at the same time.

The less said about the details the better, but for anyone, like me, who found the scene in Titanic where Kate and Leo go Irish dancing both facile and intensely annoying, Sinners is sweet revenge. In terms of what Sinners has to say about the Americanisation of its migrant communities it is surprisingly close to The Brutalist, only shorter, more entertaining, less pretentious and actually more culturally astute. If the red and blue adornments used to distinguish the otherwise identical Smoke and Stack remind the genre-literate movie buff of The Matrix, whether or not this is a conscious motif (I think it must be), at the heart of this film are fundamental choices of the red and blue pill variety; choices that are central to the price paid in the journey to being an American.

Reservations? Well, the movie has three endings. The first one is great, and I wouldn’t have been disappointed if it had finished, there and then. The second ending feels a little tagged on for the sake of catharsis, albeit an important catharsis. The third ending which comes after the initial credits (don’t leave too early as five people did in my screening!) is well worth staying for.

Oh, I forgot to mention, on top of all of this, Sinners is also kind of a musical, and the soundtrack is glorious.

Verdict: Sinners isn’t a perfect film, but it is such a ride, it is so absorbing and surprising, it is so beautifully made, so flawlessly acted by every participant, and it is so bold and original and bursting with vision that it would be churlish to award it anything less than… 10/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com