Sinners Review - Vampires, brotherhood, music & mayhem

“The history of a people are found in its songs.” - George Jellinek

A heist movie is usually exactly that. A slasher, same thing. These movies can be thoroughly entertaining. They can even achieve pop culture permanence. It’s all dependent on the people that create them. However, every once in a while a movie will come along that promises complexities. It swears to deliver nuance and originality. The dialogue hints at delicious, possible contentious exchanges that will ratchet tension and devour imitation. It will guarantee that any and all confidence it exudes is anything but a facade. If this movie were a person, it would be the life of the party and the conversations in the other room. It’s an all encompassing experience that will live and thrive in the memories of anyone that witnesses it.

If you were to describe Sinners as a vampire movie, you wouldn’t be wrong per se but it wouldn’t exactly be a proper description of it either. It would be an extremely limited, shortsighted, incomplete thought. It would be the tip of an iceberg which promises so much more just beneath the surface. You need only dive in to discover its exhilarating secrets that are just waiting with unmitigated exuberance.

Sinners is a vampire movie, absolutely. But vampires are merely a delivery system used to explore themes of racial identity, the dangers and misfortune of assimilation and the true power of music throughout time and culture. It demonstrates music as a universal language, as a common communal experience and its very existence as a yearning for freedom.

It brings up concepts of monsters and community showing each has its interpretations that can be as varied as the people who adhere to such things. It is an exploration of mankind’s existence in all of its ugliness and undeniable beauty. It just so happens to feature horrifying creatures of the night who languish in shadows, desiring sunlight and feeding on the naive and unlucky.

They are a force of evil all their own, but also represent a side of man that doesn’t need to be contained to paranormal or mythic stories for them to be cruel in their intention, unwavering in haunting their victims and relentless in their efforts to unravel and torture the historically exposed. They are a manifestation of hate driven by biases formed far from logic or reasoning but well within uncultured communities who base their fears and misunderstandings under the banner of disdain and ill intent. The vampires are merely a vessel for the evils of man for reasons as arbitrary as undead creatures drinking blood and fearing the sun.

The true driving force behind Sinners is music. It describes a world of music throughout time where the special few have come along to bless this world with song which can act as its own kind of language lasting generations and beyond likely to outlive mankind itself. It describes music as a source of healing, consoling and repairing the damages of life if only for the length of a single song.

At the end of the movie the remaining characters talk of the afternoon preceding the nightmarish evening to follow as the best time of their lives. They say that for those few hours, they were free. As with the temporary nature of a single day ending as it’s inclined to do, so too does a song but within those finite seconds, true freedom can be achieved no matter what awaits them after the final note is played and the last word sung. There is heaven in the temporary if you only look and listen for it. But with heaven, there is often that other place, following along, waiting.

Smoke and Stack are brothers, long missing from their hometown, living in 1930’s Chicago. They’ve recently returned to escape the trappings of criminal life in the big city only to bring it with them anyway. In this small town however, they are the big fish, their reputations far exceeding their arrival. They believe this place is where they can establish themselves and find success by opening a club where the traditionally outcasted are all welcome to drink and dance and get in touch with their more animalistic nature. Little do the brothers and their many friends and associates realize, no matter where they run to, evil is never far enough away. On this particular evening, it just so happens to be standing on the other side of the threshold, just begging to come in.

Michael B. Jordan plays dual characters, Smoke and Stack, each loyal to the other but with their clear differences. Smoke is very much a leader, determined and exacting. Stack presents himself as more the voice of their operation, manipulating and driving forward their ultimate plans. He is a force as both characters, loose and unpredictable as one, driven but paranoid as the other. Forged by their past, their future is perceived by them as a kind of minefield, navigable but treacherous. They operate as if any success is soon to be followed by something bad, whatever that may be. They can’t seem to enjoy their gains, at least not for long. Hailee Steinfeld plays Mary, a young woman whose past with the brothers is contentious at best, despite their strong feelings of loyalty toward one another.

On the outside resides Remmick, a sinister and conniving performance from Jack O’Connell. He is outright evil, manipulative, formidable and determined. He aims to feed on those residing within the brothers’ new dance joint but as the rules dictate, entrance comes with its requirements.

Ryan Coogler has taken an original concept and made it worth every second both visually and story wise. The characters he’s created are numerous and endlessly interesting, violent and cruel and loyal to a fault. This is his first film not based on an already established franchise or IP and it’s so wonderfully refreshing and breathtaking. His weaving of genres is unbelievable, combining horror and drama, music appreciation and action seamlessly and to amazing effect. He is proving himself a voice not to be denied in the world of cinema. He has impressed me with every new film he helms and Sinners may be one of his unquestionable masterpieces. It’s certainly one of the best movies of the year.

Sinners is a tale of two parts. Part one is an establishment of characters, rules of the story, belief systems and seeding what’s to come. It is a metaphor for the physical representation looming in part two. In part two it is an all out call to arms kind of bloodbath dead set on shredding community, building new factions and ripping apart both flesh and ideologies in equal measure. It is an impending storm in the beginning fully realized in the second half complete with monsters of the night and mythical dangers mutating with true life horrors such as bigotry, betrayal murder.

Sinners is a masterful telling of life’s nightmares, real, mythic and otherwise. But it’s also a focus of that which gives the few moments their true freedom. Whether it is music, family or finding truth, there are the momentary escapes from a reality steeped in either fantastical horrors or very real, historically evident tragedies. It’s all a bit of a wash really…