In Ryan Coogler’s Vampire Film ‘Sinners,’ Black America’s Soul Is at Stake

Sometimes it really feels like we’re living in a horror movie. We wake up everyday to headlines about innocent people being slaughtered, history being erased and individual freedoms being stripped away. Yet we persist: We sing, we love, we laugh and we create. Ryan Coogler’s new vampire film, Sinners, is an allegory for our history and our current world.

Sinners takes place during the 1930s, when many Black Americans, including my own ancestors, still picked cotton as sharecroppers to survive. There were glimpses of freedom, but the ever-present threat of racial violence loomed large in the form of Jim Crow laws and the Ku Klux Klan. In the film, we follow bootlegging twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan, who delivers a fascinating performance) as they return to their Mississippi hometown to open a juke joint. They hire the gifted Sammie (a gentle, commanding Miles Caton), a pastor’s son with a passion for singing the blues. What starts as a plan to make money and bring the Black community together escalates into a showdown against a sinister force, with their souls at stake.

Shot on 65-millimeter film by director of photography Autumn Durald, Sinners is available to watch April 17 on several different theatrical formats. The film’s visual and musical palettes are steeped in the natural beauty of Black Southern life. In one scene, Smoke stands next to a small grave under a tall, expansive tree. As its limbs stretch throughout the frame, he is almost engulfed by the beauty and heaviness of his remembrance.

In another scene, Stack, Sammie and the piano player Delta Slim (an impressive Delroy Lindo) ride down a long field as Delta Slim recounts playing music for a house full of white patrons. They paid him and his bandmate handsomely, but the Klan caught and lynched his bandmate before he could even touch or taste the freedom money could provide. The sound design here is haunting as we hear Slim’s friend screaming and dying in the background as Slim recounts the memory. All of their faces fall in grief as the car whizzes down this empty road, passing several Black men in a chain gang.

Sinners punctuates these heavy scenes with surprising sensuality, illustrating moments of deep pleasure, longing and joy. Free from the confines of the Black Panther and Creed franchises, Coogler plays with the erotic in exciting ways. In one deeply felt scene, Smoke visits the home of a former lover and hoodoo priestess, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), rekindling a passion that feels so lived in. The way Smoke touches Annie, and the way she licks and kisses him, feels rich with history and intention. In other scenes, characters look at one another with soft, raw desire.

The clash between the church and its pastor Jedidiah (played by the prolific Saul Williams), his son Sammie’s love for secular music and his lust for a young married woman named Pearline (Jayme Lawson) make for thorny, fun subplots.

Just like in the 1930s, today the dream of a free America has been punctured. Those in power want to erase history in favor of a false narrative of American togetherness and harmony. It’s a song that threatens to drown out the distinct way that the blues emerged from enslaved Africans. In Sinners, vampires are eager to extract this music and its people from their source. They become a stand-in for the way this country has become overrun by those hellbent on draining the life out of people, leaving them as empty shells.

Sinners is an epic, unapologetically Black film. Anyone looking for a quick superhero movie, or action sequences over narrative depth, may be a little disappointed here. Coogler seems to be more concerned with the complicated lives of his characters — their connections to each other and to the music.

At times, I wondered where the film was going, but the layered performances and gory scenes swept me back in. In one fascinating scene in the juke joint, Sammie plays a beautiful blues song that leads us through a timeline of Black music, from African drumming to rock, soul, rap and back to the blues. The camera moves through the space as if it were dancing along to this Black musical continuum. Here, Coogler makes it clear that this is a film about Black music and existence, and how it is so integral to the soul of this country.

The juke joint bursts into imaginary flames, and the image of Black people dancing in a burning house moved me. It’s an apt metaphor for how I often feel living in this country. We smile through enormous pain, living for whimsical, magical and sensual moments that offer fleeting glimpses of freedom and hope.

That’s what the juke joint in this film represents. The music, the night breeze, the lights. The sweat between bodies on a dance floor. The moment when someone takes a lover into a back room to taste them. The hope that your song will play forever. These details really sing and give Sinners such a sense of purpose. In the climactic finale, we see Smoke in a faceoff with the racist forces of evil that threaten the existence of his juke joint. At the screening I attended, the audience erupted in applause — a kind of cathartic joy and vengeance unleashed.

I left the film wondering, if my ancestors could create music and imagine another world nearly 100 years ago, what’s stopping us from doing it right now?

‘Sinners’ hits theaters nationwide on April 17.