Sinners

SINNERS   ***

Ryan Coogler

2025

IDEA:  Having returned from Chicago to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932, gangster twin brothers face a supernatural evil in their community.

BLURB:  It’s a measure of the (mostly) successful ambition of Sinners that it manages to logically and intuitively tie together Jim Crow-era racial politics, vampire lore, African mysticism, and an ethnomusicological dyad of blues and Irish folk songs. Not to mention, Coogler stuffs all this and more into a diegetic story that, for the most part, spans just 24 hours. The execution is not faultless - things sometimes get bogged down in exposition, there are too many characters to properly develop, and the images could use more light (or better exposure) - but the film is rarely less than compelling in its rowdy, adventurous concoction of big ideas and genre thrills. Coogler has some concepts that are extremely clever: for one, allegorizing white American society in terms of a literal vampiric consumption, and absorption, of Black culture, specifically music in this case. The film complicates any neat racial dichotomy by making the vampire leader an Irish immigrant, connecting the social plight and musical heritage of his people to that of the African-American experience. He offers the Black characters a tempting escape cloaked in a paternalistic pretext of unity that is familiar to any oppressed group: an assimilation into an established, and thus “safe,” order. Without moralizing about the individual decisions his characters make in response to this assimilation, Sinners nevertheless stands against religious and cultural hegemony, with its idiom-melding song-score serving as a celebration of polyphonic expression. It’s the surprising and poignant coda that finally coalesces the film’s existential thesis that music, as a time-crossing vessel for history and memory, is an immortal thing born from mortality.