Sinners
The sounds of song and prayer coming from within the white painted wooden sidings of the church where Jedidiah Moore preaches his sermon, his son Sammie staggers in, his clothes blood-stained rags, the broken remains of his guitar clutched in his hand, the warning that his gift of music can draw in evil seemingly come true, his father begging him to give up his sinning: “You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s going to follow you home.”
That day unfolded across the preceding twenty-four hours, from Sammie’s rendezvous with Elijah and Elias Moore, his cousins returned from Chicago where they liberated the mob of a goodly sum of cash now used to buy a mill and its land to turn it into the Juke Club with the promise of good food, drink and music, the reputation of the twins nicknamed Smoke and Stack a mixture of awe at their presence and trepidation, drawing in all kinds of folk from near and far.
Written and directed by Ryan Coogler and reuniting him with his Black Panther star Michael B Jordan in the twin roles of the Moore brothers, Sinners is set in Mississippi in October of 1932, the cotton fields blooming and the toiling workers no longer slaves but aware their wages are a pittance and that the presence of the Klan is never far, though the threat which manifests in the faces of white folk come to spoil the night is far more sinister.
Occupying a troubled space at the crossroads of an era between the Jim Crow south and the civil rights movement, the brothers businessmen who fought together in the trenches accustomed to the horrors of man now facing the things which emerge at sundown that should not exist in a sane world, Jack O’Connell is Remmick, the smiling, singing, dancing outcast who begs entrance, his face the wrong colour but his interest what lies beneath the skin.
The cast including Miles Caton as Sammie, Hailee Steinfeld as Mary, Stack’s ex who “passes” as white whom he tried to keep safe by abandoning her, Jayme Lawson as provocative singer Pearline who catches Sammie’s eye, Delroy Lindo as pianist Delta Slim, Omar Miller as doorman Cornbread and Wunmi Mosaku as Miss Annie, Smoke’s wife, also left behind after the death of their infant daughter, he holds the money but she holds the power, the only one to clearly see and understand the danger and mount a defence with what little she has to hand.
Undeniably a black film of pride and empowerment, Sinners is more than that, aware that no cultural identity is monolithic and with diversity in the townsfolk of Clarksdale and the patrons of the club, consciously transcending its setting of a time and place of endemic racism in the music numbers, Ludwig Göransson’s soundtrack drawing heavily on the blues of the era and traditional folk songs and with many of the cast performing.
Unlike some black led horrors where racism is the faceless evil, traumatising the characters with its pervasive, insidious influence, that aspect is present in Sinners but it is not the driving force, the evil which knocks at the door both more directly destructive but also more subtle and seductive, the film sitting alongside the classics of the genre in a cocktail of old elements presented in monstrous new form, a period piece which is never other than thoroughly modern.
An invitation to the bloody orgy, a dance with the damned, Sinners is not a perfect film with a superfluous final credit scene which along with some others could be trimmed, but it is closer than most, thrilling, shocking, engrossing, flawlessly executed and above all uncompromised, a vision of hell and redemption tinged with the essence of liquor, woodsmoke and pickled garlic.
Sinners is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX
