Originally a European lore, myth and story, vampires have long held great fascination all around the world. While a huge number of literary and cinematic iterations vis-a-vis the blood sucking monster originating from Europe explored themes of love, obsession as well as the notions of East versus West, otherness and fear of the exotic in the Christian, colonial Victorian era (among other things), varying versions emerging especially from the US have presented audiences with a more (sometimes) nuanced, naturalized vampire. Resonating with the already enthralled audience, the Americanized vampire is – perhaps – a walk away from the old world and an embodiment of the new world from Uncle Sam’s perspective, considering most of them have been white men and women (and a lot of lycans/werewolves – natural enemies of the vampires – being either black or having different ethnicities). That said, traditional narratives of the American vampire saw a transformative change with the likes of Marvel’s and later Stephen Norrington’s depictions of the vampire hunting vampire Blade (played by Wesley Snipes), even Rodriquez-Tarantino’s From Dusk till Dawn or Ryan Coogler’s juxtaposition of the white and black American vampires in Sinners.
Sinners written and directed by Ryan Coogler is not just another, run-of-the-mill, vampire movie. The director illustrates an expansive canvas, pulsating with religious, cultural and ethnic undertones and reverberating with musical and American gothic tonalities.
Major spoilers alert from this point forward as this is more than a review! From the plot perspective and in a nutshell, the movie is set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta and unravels a series of events when twin brothers – Smoke and Stack: a dual role played by Michael B Jordan – World War I veterans return to Clarksdale to begin again, leaving behind the Chicago mobster life. With stolen mafia money and Irish whiskey in hand, the duo buy a white-man owned sawmill to be converted into a Juke joint. They hire the services of family, friends and others in between for the day to kickstart their business for the local community. Different storylines are intertwined with one another – Smoke’s reunion with his estranged wife Annie, played by Wunmi Mosaku, both mourning the death of their infant; Stack’s reunion with his love interest Annie, played by Hailee Steinfeld, recruiting both the God-fearing cousin Sammie to play music, enacted by Miles Caton and the liquor chugging Delta Slim played by Delroy Lindo. All hell breaks loose at the opening night of the Juke joint when three vampires, attracted by the music, try to join in.
Sinners is most definitely a masterclass in storytelling where the director deftly sets an anticipatory stage of thrill and dread for his viewers from the get-go. It is dawn when a young African American (Sammie) holding a broken guitar stumbles out from the car and into a white painted house of God where his father – a pastor – is giving a sermon. Gashes on his face, never letting go of his guitar, the audience’s attention is then shifted to events of the day earlier.
The flashback begins with the pastor’s warning to his son who is about to step out for a day-long journey with his twin cousins, recruiting people for the Juke joint opening. The warning: “You keep dancing with the devil, and one day it’s gonna follow you home,” is more like a foreboding of what is to befall later. The twins buying a sawmill from someone who is the embodiment of Jim Crow’s America is Coogler’s sinister warning of what will beset this town.
Setting foot in the town, are the twins an embodiment of evil vis-à-vis the evil that will unravel later? Yes Smoke and Stack come back home with dirty money and whiskey stolen from the Chicago mobster outfit. Smoke even shoots one who tries to steal the already stolen whiskey, but pays to get him all stitched up, and even before that he schools a girl on how to negotiate a good price for looking after his whisky laden truck.
AI generated: Gemini
The broad canvas painted by the director also showcases how music – raw – coalesces the human and universal spirit. The cinematic experience makes the viewers ponder about the purity of music itself. What is purity anyway… refine and distil to do away all that is real and soulful? Coogler artfully juxtaposes the impurity and purity of music… racial impurity of music (attuned to folk, peasant or indigenous music) that is both transcendental, deeply resonant and unifying with the racially ‘pure’ – frigid and infertile! Just as he exposes whiteness and blackness – the former, opaque and colorless, the latter rich and divine?
It is perhaps music’s metaphyicality or rather transcendental, supra-physicality that can not only attract the soulful; but can also enchant evil to push on forward, gouge and devour. Reminds one of how Ungoliant, the evil giant spider, in Tolkien’s Silmarillion devoured the gleaming sap of the Two Trees of Valinor.
There is cohesion in rawness, it is unity, one witnesses that as soon as Sammie begins to croon. Immediately it seems the universe has cohesively come to order, reverberating through timelines – all is one and one is all! This is great power. And this is also one act that evil must taint, contain, overwhelm and conquer.
Religious oeuvres through-out the movie are given a climatic ending when Sammie heads towards the river and leader of the vampire’s pack Remmick, played by Jack O’ Connell , catches him there… dunking his head in water as an act of baptism… or rather the white man’s evangelistic imposition of it. It is then evil is undone when Sammie smashes his face with the silver of his guitar and it is then the sun rises.
(Big Spoiler) Even in the end credits, the scene the director teases the audience with an afterthought – yet another juxtaposition: the more human vampire versus the evil one (Remmick)?
Coogler makes us ask and wonder what evil truly is? How it turn off our humanness… ? Can evil still retain specks of – not goodness – but humanness? How does this work in the greater scheme of things…? And should one think of good and evil in terms of binaries?
