Sinners

Writer-director Ryan Coogler arrives at Sinners as something between a genre filmmaker, an auteur and a cultural historian who has discovered, via his apprenticeship at Marvel, that genre is a useful and profitable delivery mechanism for a deep thesis. Set in the Jim Crow era Delta, it follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack who open a juke joint only to find their dream besieged by vampires both real and metaphorical.

Coogler’s stand is not merely that Black lives matter, but that Black American culture — specifically the blues — is the bedrock of modern popular music, built by people systematically excluded from other forms of cultural legitimacy. Their art and music were one inheritance not imposed upon them but rather born of “something carried here”. Coogler frames this as a sacred legacy, a songline running from West African griots through Delta blues and out into funk, soul, hip-hop and beyond. (He appears uninterested in jazz and barely nods to the great rock and roll synthesis-to-come. That’s the living spirit of Nile Rodgers you glimpsed, by the way, not the ghost of Hendrix.)

The vampires, when they arrive, are doing what colonisers do: turning up at the door, performing a version of what’s inside back at the occupants and expecting entry, promising money. It’s almost Robert Johnson’s crossroads bargain — the colonial devil’s appetite dressed up in a folk arrangement and calling itself appreciation.

The Celtic scales vampire boss Remmick deploys to enchant his prey complicate this usefully. The Irish were also dispossessed, their music also a carried resistance, their deals were also reneged — Native Americans appear, briefly, to make the same point. Coogler’s argument is that this is what cultural appropriation actually looks like from the inside: not theft at knifepoint but an offer you can’t refuse. And finally the oppressed become oppressors, and we’ll all make beautiful music together.

Sinners is so loaded with metaphor one could dig for what isn’t even there. While the Delta isn’t worked up in this way, one can picture multiple songlines converging. Sammie’s set-piece juke joint performance collapses time and space to conjure the full diaspora uniting and dispersing in a single ecstatic sequence.

Against all this, vampirism as a genre is treated as infrastructure rather than subject. When the film must manage the bloodsucking logistics of stake and garlic it visibly loses momentum. These overlooked details might have been interesting to develop into yet more metaphor but we don’t have all day.

The writing improves markedly on Coogler’s previous Black Panther; the dialogue breathes, and Coogler is somewhat more trusting of his characters to carry the weight of his ideas rather than announce them.

The filmmaker’s ambition is real. Whether it frays into overreach, or a patchwork of hits and misses, is perhaps the wrong question to ask of a film swinging this hard.