‘Sinners’ a winner: Coogler’s stylistically audacious musical movie reinvents the horror genre
“Sinners” — 4 stars
It takes a long, long time before the gross and gory stuff creeps into writer/director Ryan Coogler’s stylistically audacious, salaciously sleazy and belligerently original musical horror tale “Sinners.”
When it does, “Sinners” confirms that we’re witnessing a bold reinvention of the horror genre, a truly frightening experience that unleashes the disturbing dark power of the blues, blends it with old-fashioned, Christianity-based vampire lore, all designed to warn us about the seductive appeal of evil’s inclusive charms in an epic story set against the racist political landscape of the Jim Crow-era South.
And it possesses a sly sense of humor.
The movie begins in 1932 with a freaked-out sharecropper nicknamed Preacher Boy (newcomer Miles Caton) covered in blood, his cheeks ripped with claw marks, who stumbles into the arms of his pastor dad in church.
“You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home,” his father warns.
Abruptly, the movie whisks us back in time, a day earlier.
We meet Smoke and Stack, well-dressed identical twins (both played by Coogler’s “Fruitville Station,” “Creed” and “Black Panther” star Michael B. Jordan) returning to their hometown of Clarksdale after surviving and apparently thriving for several years in Chicago.
Flushed with liquor supplies and cash (rumors say the two worked with Al Capone), the brutally tough twins — one shoots two would-be booze thieves in the legs just to teach them a lesson — buy an abandoned saw mill from a white owner named Hogwood (David Maldonado) so they can convert it into a fabulous juke joint for entertainment-starved black customers.
But won’t the local KKK have a problem with this? Hogwood says no.
Right …
The twins quickly secure talented local musicians for their opening night, among them Preacher Boy and a legendary Irish-whiskey-loving harmonica and piano player named Delta Slim (the always-great Delroy Lindo).
To supply advertising and food, Smoke asks for assistance from local Chinese American grocer Bo Chow (Yao) and his wife, Grace (Li Jun Li), who eagerly join the team.
Meanwhile, love interests abound for the main men.
Stack awkwardly relights an old flame named Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a white woman back in town for her mother’s funeral, where she still carries an acetylene torch for the twin.
Preacher Boy, whose real name is Sammie, becomes beguiled by a stylish, real looker of a woman at the train station, Pearline (Jayme Lawson), seeking some romantic attention apparently lacking in her fizzling marriage.
As for Smoke, he re-hooks up with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a mystical spiritual healer, magic practitioner and, as we discover, the mother of their late infant son, now buried next to a shade tree.
Coogler doesn’t skimp on the raw sexual chemistry between these sweaty, combustible characters, although one suspects non-nudity clauses may have been in force as these passionate lovers always keep their clothes on.
Oh, just when we begin to wonder if Coogler has forgotten all about the horror part of his movie, a smoldering ancient vampire named Remmick (a chilling Jack O’Connell with glowing eyeballs) literally drops into the picture just in time to recruit farming couple Bert and Joan (Peter Dreimanis and Lola Kirke) to be his fellow musicians in a singing trio hoping to be invited in to play at the saw mill.
The carnage begins with multiplying vampires picking off the humans in a horrific assault that has less in common with Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk to Dawn” than with Don Siegel’s sci-fi thriller “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” where humans become altered versions of themselves, sharing a scary collective mindset deprived of free will.
“Sinners” serves up its pièce de résistance in a brilliantly executed surrealistic sequence during which Sammie sings an original song (“I Lied to You”) while Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s 65 mm IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70 cameras sweep over the saw mill audience who morph from local musicians and dancers into African, Asian and Native American entertainers — ghosts from the ancient past and the near future — all blending together in a singularly awe-inspiring tapestry of movement, sound, color and emotion.
I recommend two things: Experiencing “Sinners” in the IMAX format for maximum effect and staying through the credits to catch two end tags. (The first is better than the last.)
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Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Delroy Lindo
Directed by: Ryan Coogler
Other: A Warner Bros. theatrical release. Rated R for language, sexual situations and violence. 137 minutes.