Review | Sinners

Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners is a vampire parable of racial solidarity and alienation, writes Jack Witek.

If it’s true that Tom Cruise saved cinema and theatrical distribution during the pandemic, then he did so paving the way for Ryan Coogler to make Sinners. Set in 1932 Mississippi, Sinners is a Southern Gothic, Delta blues-infused vampire parable of racial solidarity and alienation, spirituality and self-actualisation, and a love song to the medium as much as it is to the blues. As per the Martin Scorsese meme, this is cinema. 

Sinners marks a return to Coogler’s roots having navigated big tent franchise IPs for several years. He circles back to the territory of his debut Fruitvale Station with its affirmations of life in the face of the murderous brutality of white supremacy. And Sinners stands as a testament to his love for celluloid, which he lays out in a disarmingly unpretentious viral promo that resonated with audiences seeking authenticity and sincerity in the age of on-demand streaming and scrolling brain rot. 

Drawing inspiration from his own family this is also Coogler’s most personal work to date, spurring him to negotiate an unheard of ownership deal with Warner Brothers. This clearly rattled some corners of the Hollywood (or should that be Silicon Valley?) establishment, as a whisper campaign emerged to delegitimise its obvious box office success. This was quickly rounded on by Coogler’s peers though, with Mr Movies himself, Tom Cruise making a highly legible gesture of support and seemingly nipping it in the bud. 

Fair warning: spoilers below. 

Coogler picks up his ongoing collaboration with Michael B. Jordan, who seamlessly plays the film’s twin-brother leads Elijah ‘Smoke’ and Elias ‘Stack’ Moore, thanks to the discipline of classic in-camera movie magic. When we meet the twins they are returning home to small town Mississippi, having survived first the Jim Crow south, then the trenches of Germany in the Great War, and eventually plying their skills in the Chicago mob scene. After swindling from all sides of the organised crime community, they realise that the big city’s promise of progress is just small town segregation in fancier suits. 

Opining that ‘better the devil you know’, they resolve to carve out their slice of the American dream by opening a rural juke joint club, reuniting a diverse cast of collaborators and denizens of the night from their former lives. Which is when the local vampire scene shows up. 

In Coogler’s last significant collaboration with Jordan, where he plays T’Challa’s cousin Erik ‘Killmonger’ in Black Panther, we see a duality of status-quo reformism and revolutionary zeal bound up in familial conflict. There are echoes of this in Smoke and Stack, who while inseparable, represent conflicting natures pulling in opposite directions, one toward the safety and rootedness of tradition, spirituality and community, the other rushing forward with an accelerationist ‘move fast and break things’ dynamism that he gambles with. 

In Sinners the vampire functions as an uncanny doppelganger, just as in the mythological imagination and successive fictional works the vampire is a shapeshifter, reflecting our anxieties and preoccupations in different forms and guises. Karl Marx, a highly cited sicko, frequently deployed vampiric metaphors to describe the inhuman processes of capitalism: ‘Capital is dead labour, which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ Published 14 years after the death of Marx, Bram Stoker’s Dracula can be read as a fable of the petty bourgeois merchant class being confronted with the old world’s aristocrat, the twisted landed gentry ‘old money’ in its crumbling estates on the turning of the bloody gears of modernity, perversely enduring, uncannily attached to its dead capital – quite literally the Count’s possesed castle, an extension of his will, and tended to by new money (and blood). But in a game of capital, the house always wins. Unless you put a stake through its heart.

Here, the vampiric allegory is unambiguously settler colonialism and ‘the white devil’, sucking the life-blood of the black population, appropriating black culture, and turning racial communities against one another in divide and rule, and is screening during the five year anniversary of Black Lives Matter. Black ownership is an issue that informs the real-world studio and creative dynamics of the film. 

When we first meet Remmick, he is being pursued by a vampire hunting party of Choctaw tribesmen who run him down to the abode of a Klan family that he sets his teeth into and turns to the night. We learn that the Klan chapter this family belongs to is the same that covertly sold the juke joint venue to the Moore twins, in order to lure their patrons into a killing field. But the vampires are one step ahead, and the subsequent blood sucking frenzy reverberates the memory of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.

In the car ride to the club, recruited blues veteran Delta Slims talks of how white people like the blues just fine, they just don’t like the people who make it. Remmick seeks to supernaturally assimilate the community into his own, and we see tensions and ambiguities play out arising from overlapping racial identities. 

Remmick is an Irish vampire from the Old Country, who instrumentalises his whiteness in the cause of a good meal. But he belongs to a people colonised by the English, ruled by the British Empire and discriminated against abroad. Slipping between identities and dialects, imploring the club’s patrons that actually we’re all just alike, he seeks out the juke joint and thirsts for entry from a profound sense of haunted kinship, yet he cannot stop himself from twisting and weaponising this against them. It is perhaps notable that Hailee Steinfeld’s Mary, with her mixed race heritage and the complexities this throws up in the narrative, is the person who sits down with the vampires for a perilous chat. 

In our world, the Choctaw and Irish nations share overt bonds of solidarity of the colonised that formally endure to this day, and the American experience is perfectly at home with assimilated immigrants persecuting and disavowing in turn to maintain their relative status advantage. 

The Hoodoo priestess Annie tells us that throughout history there are special seers who wield the power of music to bridge forward and backward in time and anchor to the present, as we see represented in a dizzying and ecstatic set piece centred around the gifted blues guitarist Sammie. Looking back, Sammie says that before the massacre, that night at the juke joint was the greatest of his life. 

Marxist theorist and professor of film studies Carl Boggs coined the term prefigurative politics to talk about prefigurative revolutionary spaces where the future can be enacted, and in the communion, solidarity, chaotic joy and it-takes-a-village collective endeavor of opening the club, I think we see this. It is a golden horizon that would never dawn for any of them but which the lone survivors would be haunted by for the rest of their lives, having glimpsed it as well as its bloody negation. And through the ultimate collective artform of cinema and the theatre, always in dialogue with its own history and enduring into the future, we could all glimpse it too.