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It is uncovered that, if performed correctly, certain songs of the South could even sever the jugular. (How’s that for soul?). While previously such power had been thought impossible, now– thanks to Ryan Coogler’s latest film Sinners– the blues are actually shown as the harmonica slide mojo bag eternally trailed by that bloodsucking stinger you had thought was mere legend. As if there weren’t enough things to worry about, Sinners coaxes from its cave the thing you’ve only heard whispers of, sensual and preying on a talented cast of proselytes, an otherworldly temptation. Of course, isn’t it always better to know the source of the things you’re hearing, licking their chops, humming in the forest, just a taste?
Mississippi, 1932. The film opens with a beautifully disturbing flashforward to the return of a badly-injured Sammie Moore (portrayed by actor and singer Miles Caton) to the Mississippi Delta church where his father is the preacher. Sammie’s father embraces his scarred son, before asking him to repent for his sins. However, no time to hear his decision, the film moves backward in time to one day prior in which identical twins, World War I veterans Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” (both portrayed by Michael B. Jordan), return to the Delta from Chicago with plans to open a juke. Along the way, the brothers recruit several allies across the town of Clarksdale, including their prodigious musician cousin, Sammie, as well as Smoke’s estranged wife, a grocer, a sharecropper, and a seasoned blues musician, all of whom agree to help get the first party off the ground after hearing how successful the juke could be (and portrayed by Wunmi Mosaku, Li Jun Li, Omar Benson Miller, and Delroy Lindo, respectively); later, this group is also joined by Stack’s ex-lover, the spurned octoroon Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) who attends the party despite protests from the community. This ensemble drama, while completely captivating on its own, soon runs parallel to another spellbinding storyline in which Remmick (Jack O’Connell) flees Choctaw pursuers– who warn of his evil nature– to the home of two Klan members. Under the cover of night, then, when the Choctaw are forced to abandon their hunt, Remmick attacks his keepers, and they join him in travelling to the juke’s front door. Naturally, supernaturally, this sets the action of the film into motion, bloodied but not beleaguered.
What unfolds thereafter in Sinners is a blues throwdown with the powers-that-be so soulful it leaves the room spinning, in and out of focus. The aperture of the shots widening and narrowing, the juke stage flattening to vaudeville and back to horror, sleek and sexy. Soul pours from the movie’s every setpiece– though this comes as no surprise given the creative reverence clearly poured into the film’s choreography, its performances and plotting. Actually, in an April 4th press conference delivered ahead of the Sinners release, the film’s cast and Coogler repeatedly emphasized the role of music, musicality, and harmony in the production. Specifically, the actors praised Coogler’s “horizontal” leadership and complex script, and Coogler praised his cast for giving their all while having sympathy for his directorial process (particularly Jordan, having directed Creed III). This respect for the creative metronome is what makes the film so compelling, it is able to tease out ideas– on morality and evil, race, American history, religion and more– by full heartedly returning to its 12-bar roots. Indeed, it is this truly musical center of the film which creates that hypnotically impressionistic bloodsucker story, making it the juicy and choice morsel that it is. The vibe of the vampire, it is impossible to separate Sinners from its beating heart, pumping hot blood through endless veins into its action sequences as Michael B. Jordan’s character leads his ragtime band against what may only seem to be the Devil (but who knows?). Though it's a common theme, the blues scale, the film hits every note it can for color: it does not resolve its progression easily, or in one way, and every character is complicated by their off-beat deviations from what seems like righteousness, and even the orders of Heaven and Hell seem insufficient to denote the diversity of powers their music portends.
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Critically, what Coogler resists in vibing with the vampire is a contemporary trend which Namwali Serpell, in her recent essay for The New Yorker, dubs the style of “The New Literalism.” A dangerous temptation itself, Serpell’s essay diagnoses this as the metastasizing spore oozing and festering on the backs of today’s films, caused by bludgeoning the point past the point of death. Art which demands mediation while hollering the theme all the way home, says Serpell “It is, in fact, condescending. Forget the degradation of art into content. Content has been demoted to concept. And concept has become a banner ad.” She even goes so far as attribute this to the Freudian death drive, that alienating urge to repeat history toward mastery of it which, in its repetition, superimposes the past onto the present rather than redressing it. To Coogler’s credit, it would have been easy for the film to slip into the literalist register, conjuring the simplest spirits imaginable with respect to the postbellum South, and joining the flat ranks of recent satirists (see the 2024 Oscar Nominee lineup). To death drive the undead into lazy metaphor. Nevertheless, Coogler instead choses key chord substitutions, preventing his audiences from sliding comfortably into either satire or allegory. Indeed, we cannot read this a quickly Black and white story, for how would that pay respect to the racial diversity of this moment in time? What of the Asian and indigenous communities whose cultures also fell into the crossfires of atavistic tragedy? Equally, we cannot easily reject the vampirism of the blues as exclusively the provenance of white people nor can we call the way of the jukehouse the way of pure good. Can we even easily locate the film’s namesake? Shit, that’s the blues baby. Sinners fights stake-in-hand for the music, to resist the beckoning dance with the death drive.
In this resistance, too, this complicated filmic chord structure similarly quickfoots beyond another repetitive trend of “Antebellum Fauxstalgia” in twenty-first century Black art identified by Julian Lucas, writing for this magazine a decade ago. Lucas spotted this tendency as the inclination toward “closed arena[s] where the country can exorcise its racial demons without touching too closely on the here and now” or art which hyper-fixates on slavery. After all, we can all agree on the unpopularity of slavery– what a mistake that was– even if we cannot all stand to hear its continued reverberations in our time. So, having flocked afeared to films such as, say, Tarantino’s Django, Unchained– which appears as an apt counterpoint to Sinners, at least for its similar studio backing and visual quality– Sinners unsettles us with another variation by situating in the postbellum past and looking forward. Bang! Beware light spoilers, but in one central scene in the film’s second act, for instance, a musical performance by Sammie allows the blues tradition to call not just back to Africa but also into the future, to shake that ass, bitch. It strikes a refreshing suspension against the canon, to actually indict the persistence of the condition from past to present rather than merely analogizing present to past, again, from the top.
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What’s special about the film, then, is that its originality unmasks and addresses a much-needed moment of creative authenticity, using the pastorals we have seen ad absurdum to tease out in a 12 bar form something completely unexpected and hard to figure. Again, while Sinners could’ve followed the predictable common time and been a slapdash vampiric metaphor for the consumption of Black culture, with blues as a synecdoche, it chooses its alternative path. A path with blues in the foreground, whose ideological ends are obscured by thrawn darkness, where hope can be heard but not quite seen, making you moan out raspy music from your ribs. Thus, one does not get the impression that Coogler was sat at the page, plotting heavily but that he was tickling his creative ivories to his film’s benefit. From the plantation which has been rehashed into a sharecropping afterlife, often representationally reopening the wounds of the past to jeeringly remind us that it was bad back then, Sinners refuses to simplify a complex story. It uses a rep n’ rev, repetition and revision, a seemingly simple palette to (re)complicate themes. This extends even down to its cast– the discoveries of what lies dormant in the history of Hailee Steinfeld, the Jordan twins’ evil within as a split human drawn toward opposing seductresses. And then there’s the impossible to deny O’Connell performance, which seems to presciently come right as a conveniently raceblind obsession with Ireland has gripped social media, but dislocates that caricature in Southern twang. You can’t help but catch it in Sinners (or can you?). It’s lyrically present and always, an apt film for right now, thinking about the origins of the things we’re seeing played out on stages across the world. Right in the pocket, sending uncontrollable tingles down your leg and up your spine right to your neck:
Certainly, this does not mean that one cannot find a veritable jazz combo of interlocutors for the film. To the contrary, in the way of ancestors we could quickly name the whole body of Zora Neale Hurston, if not specifically Jonah’s Gourd Vine; as a return to the South narrative, too, The Sport of the Gods also appears a brother in arms; then there are the Caribbean pioneers of the Zombie as a metaphor for captivity who metaphorically resurrect; not to mention D’Arcy’s “The Black Vampyre: A Legend of St. Domingo.” In more recent time, too, this film also falls in line with another studio project by Black millennial talent which just two months ago far exceeded critical and commercial expectations, HooRae Media’s comedy One of Them Days.. Likewise, it’d be foolish to not also mention Rungano Nyoni’s rave-reviewed On Becoming A Guinea Fowl, a Zambian project distributed by A24 as a gem among a troubled Spring crop (see Death of A Unicorn). It’s interesting to see against a shrinking box office that those impossibly flexible, familiar transatlantic sounds remain stalwart against the ebb and flow of industry, regime to regime. It would seem that Sinners cements where the unlimited cultural power lies, and it does not play around with it carelessly; intelligently, too, it does not believe everything that it’s heard either.
See: the form of the blues has a certain progression, if that means anything to you. On the one hand, it’s ancestors include the spirituals, field hollers, shouts, and chants of slavery, all in concert with a call-and-response tradition which can be traced back to Africa; on the other, it’s descendants include jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, and many more to rival Abraham, all in harmony in a praxis that continues into Harlem, Detroit, L.A., D.C., as well as around the American South. Its promise is freedom undelivered, a repossession of the self just out of reach and, as the cast hangs between the song of servitude or being apostate of Devil, they have a choice to make.
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In the dark Southern woods, sawed-off shotgun to your head, down on your luck, end of the line, lawman on the way, which eternity would you choose? If you had thousands of years of drifting and grifting archived in your bones like Michael B. Jordan’s Stack and and Smoke, for instance, only ever suckled at the breast of a stranger, would you think a little differently? If all around you the afterlife had already started to bleed into your “real world” of unimaginable violence, and you were promised delicious gifts on either side, eternal ecstasy or eternal peace, what then? After all you’ve known as freedom being sporadic and fugitive in the one-night-only juke, would the sight of one or so Grand Dragons on the dark side be so off putting, if the reward for surrendering were eternal bliss? Are you even good enough to be on such a high horse? Behind your back, a pack animal is baring its fangs, making the neck hairs under your coif stand at attention, breathing wet and hot, waiting for invitation. Sinners will help you think this one through; anyway, you could use the help, for it is suspected that you cannot go from one death world to another so easily. Pick a note.
2025