Film review: Sinners is a heady mix of sex, garlic and the blues

Sex and garlic and the blues. That’s Sinners in a nutshell. It’s also about the only thing in this big-budget production from writer/director Ryan Coogler that would fit in one. This movie is loud and proud, big and brash.

And original. I mean, yes, it involves vampires, not to mention a character named Annie (played by Wunmi Wosaku) who knows all the ways to kill them or at least keep them at bay. But they don’t even show their faces (or fangs) until about half-way through the film. Though it’s bloody terrifying when they do.

The setting is Clarksdale, Mississippi — birthplace of the blues! — on a sunny Saturday in the fall of 1932. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Cooler regular Michael B. Jordan, have just rolled into town after an absence of the better part of a decade. They’ve amassed some cash, and they aim to purchase an abandoned mill, turn it into a juke joint, and get even richer.

But the joint needs its juke, and so they round up their cousin Sammie (musician-turned-actor Miles Caton) and harmonica maestro Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo). Cornbread (Omar Miller), whom they pluck out of a cotton field, will be the bouncer.

They also get reacquainted with several women who haven’t forgotten them, including Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) and the aforementioned Annie, whom I’m guessing saw the original Nosferatu movie at least twice when it came out 10 years earlier.

Coogler got his feature debut in a big way, with 2013’s Fruitvale Station (original titled Fruitvale), which won the Grand Jury prize and the audience award when it debited at the Sundance Film Festival. Despite being snubbed at the Oscars, it led to Coogler directing the Rocky sequel Creed and two Black Panther movies, all of which he also co-wrote.

But Sinners is his first non-franchise, sole-writing-credit film since Fruitvale Station, albeit with a budget two orders of magnitude bigger than that film’s $900,000. It’s a joy to watch, and also to listen to, with a bombastic score by Ludwig Grandson (The Mandalorian, Oppenheimer) that dips in and out of the film, sometimes giving way to performances by one of more of the characters, before picking up the heavy lifting again.

It also does some lovely light lifting, as when a character’s three strikes on a stubborn match perfectly synchronize with the music’s rhythm. Or when a necklace torn from a body signals the end of a song. These little harmonies are wonderful precisely because they’re not overdone.

I found myself reminded several times of the 1979 song The Devil Went Down to Georgia, given the film’s portrayal of the intersection of secular music and something evil in the world. And I was knocked silly and sideways by a raucous scene in Smoke/Stack’s establishment, in which Sammie’s guitar music conjures up collaborations with phantoms of past and future performers, including a 19th-century Japanese dancer and a 21st-century electric guitarist. If the TARDIS from Dr. Who had a disco, this is what it would look like.

That scene was filmed with Imax cameras, and although not every part of the movie uses the full size of the screen, Imax is still the best way to see Sinners if you can. Failing that, go for the biggest screen you can find.

Sinners opens April 18 in theatres.