Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is an outstanding example of what blockbuster cinema can be

The pleasure of Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a hybrid of genre and impulses, lies in the imagination. The film is set mostly in the 1930s, as twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to a small town in the South to open up a juke joint. Escaping the false dreams of the North, they use their newly acquired business acumen and cash to set the town afire with music and booze. Enlisting their cousin, the barely legal Sammie (Miles Caton), as a musician, their opening night is like a brief flash of freedom and liberation within the Jim Crow South. The pressure valve holding things together, though, is about to burst and a supernatural evil is lurking in the darkness.

Coogler crafts Sinners with a keen sense of cinema’s greatest powers: the manipulation of time and space. It’s a movie about memory. The film’s structure twists and turns its way around the tropes of vampire stories to create a powerful and messy allegory about being Black in America. It’s a movie where sound travels through time; stories enlivened by the echoes of past experiences and the power of music transports, elevates and catalyzes powerful emotions. The score by Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther, Oppenheimer) tenses up against rhythm and blues, a clash of raging pulses of metal and banjo; past, present and future wrapped into one. Sinners isn’t a movie about the past as much as it’s a film about the people who passed through it. What was still is and always will be, as long as it continues to live through people. 

The pulsing music and sound that runs through the movie grinds at you from below. It’s a movie that shakes your bones and boils your blood, even before it gets started. Sinners, as the title suggests, invites us into the lives of people hoping to break free, who find themselves tangled in the realm of sex and violence. The movie overflows with eroticism and death. It’s a movie deeply felt, where fluids of all kinds blur the line between man and woman, life and death — mouths drool, blood spurts, sweat pours. Sinners aches, not only from violence, but with want, as bodies press up against each other with a desperate longing that shakes into destruction. 

At the height of the juke joint’s opening night, Coogler crafts one of the most singular scenes featured in any blockbuster film in the past decade. The liquor has flowed, the catfish has been fried and the music has gotten into people’s bones. The camera moves in a single take, an uninterrupted intruder on the dancefloor, where people’s bodies writhe with history. If we contain within our bodies not only our past but our futures, through music, this scene finds the webs of those connections. It’s a scene of such explosive imagination that people gasped, laughed and clapped in the audience. It’s a scene that transcends classical storytelling; through the celebration of the fullness of life, it pinpoints the cruelty that will follow. What happens when a life has been cut short before its time? What histories and futures do we lose?

Sinners, despite its experimental nature and ambition, remains a crowd-pleasing blockbuster. Building on the success of Creed and Black Panther, Coogler strikes the rare balance of a filmmaker who successfully navigates the big time. It’s a movie on par with the best of James Cameron and Steven Spielberg, offering a general audience something that vibrates with entertainment and also newness. It reimagines classic storytelling to do something exciting and embodied, something that doesn’t talk down to its audience, but instead invites them to experience cinema at its fullest potential. 

With the world burning, the movie feels extremely of the moment as it toys with the nuance of catharsis. It’s hard to watch Sinners and not think of some of Tarantino’s more recent work that re-imagines history, and the purpose of those detours. Coogler does something similar here, but with added levels of spiritual complexity. The film doesn’t feel weightless or glib, but deeply rooted in thought and lived experiences. Sinners feels like a film from a different era — where filmmakers were able to make big, ambitious original movies on a massive budget. It doesn’t feel compromised or scaled back by executives or data points. It’s a movie that feels fully realized and fully human. ■

Sinners opens in Montreal theatres on Friday, April 18.

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