Ryan Coogler’s vampire film about a juke joint in 1932 Mississippi is at its best before the vampires arrive, and the hour of music that opens it is as good as anything he has made. The siege that follows is well staged and more ordinary.
Smoke and Stack, twins played by Michael B. Jordan, come back to the Mississippi Delta in 1932 with money, a truck and a sawmill they intend to turn into a juke joint by that evening. Ryan Coogler, writing and directing, spends his first hour on the getting ready: who will play, who will cook, who will stand on the door, who is still angry about being left. It is the best hour he has directed. After dark, a stranger called Remmick (Jack O’Connell) turns up outside with two friends and a fiddle, and Sinners becomes the vampire film its poster promised. That film is good. The one before it was better.
Autumn Durald Arkapaw shoots on large-format film, and the daylight scenes have the depth that only that sort of negative gives you: cotton fields that go back for miles, dust in the air, sweat on skin you feel you could touch. Hannah Beachler’s mill is a real building with a bad roof and a plank floor, and by the time the lamps are lit and the bodies are moving it feels like a place that could hold everyone who has ever wanted to dance on a Saturday. Ruth E. Carter puts the brothers in city suits that are a little too good for the town, and everyone else in cotton that has been washed until it is soft. Nobody looks like they are wearing a costume.
The scene the film will be remembered for comes in the middle. Sammie (Miles Caton) gets up to play, and as the song builds the camera leaves him and travels the mill, and the dance floor starts to fill with people who should not be there, musicians from before and after 1932, until the roof is on fire and nobody has noticed. It runs for several minutes in what plays as a single move. We sat forward, then realised some time later that we had not blinked. Ludwig Göransson’s score does the hard work here, laying electric guitar and drums under a Delta blues song without making it sound like a remix, and the effect is of one music reaching forward and back to shake hands with all the others.
Jordan is fine as both brothers and better as Smoke, the quieter one, who carries a gun he would rather not use and a grief he would rather not name. Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim has the film’s best speech, delivered from the back of a truck about a man he once knew, and Lindo plays it with the ease of someone who has decided the scene is his. Wunmi Mosaku’s Annie is the one person in the mill who understands what has arrived outside, and Mosaku makes her fear practical rather than theatrical. Caton, in his first film, has a low, unhurried singing voice and a face that does not yet know how to lie, which is exactly what Sammie needs. Hailee Steinfeld has less to do and does it sharply.
O’Connell’s Remmick is the best idea in the second half. He is courteous, he wants to be liked, and he and his friends sing folk songs at the door with real feeling, which is more unsettling than any amount of hissing. He also has a reason for wanting in, and it connects to the film’s argument about who gets to own a music. But once the rules of the siege are set, Coogler follows them. Michael P. Shawver’s cutting, patient all evening, gets busy; people run into the dark and come back changed, and we knew who would and roughly when. We felt the film get smaller. A picture that had been about a whole town became a picture about a doorway, and we had seen that picture before.
Set against Coogler’s own work, this is the first film he has made from nothing but his own script, after Fruitvale Station, Creed and Black Panther, and it is the loosest and most personal of them. It is also, at 138 minutes, the one most in need of a stern friend; there are two speeches in the last half hour that explain what the juke joint scene had already shown us.
See it on the largest screen within reach, and go for the music. The vampires are a reasonable excuse to stay.
