What if the most horrifying day of your life turns out to also be the best day of your life?
Of all of the ideas that Ryan Coogler’s brilliant Sinners touches on – and trust me, there are a lot of them, and you’ll have to keep up – this one will linger with me in particular. As will the notion that music draws us into a place outside time, a place of immortality, in fact.
Earlier this year, Coogler told the New Yorker that his favorite film is Jacques Audiard’s The Prophet, and you can see how he has taken Audiard’s piercing power and made it into his own instrument, whether he’s talking about race or the notion of eternal life. And he does it all with his own, distinctly Black and distinctly American style.
If you haven’t seen Sinners yet, I highly recommend ungluing your ass from the couch and making the trek to the movie theater (and staying for the entirety of the credits). I often use this column to complain about how no one in my life will see good horror/supernatural films with me in the theaters, but I had to put my foot down for Sinners.
It’s both a carousel of an experience and a terrific work of art. It demands the big screen.
Sinners is about a lot of things, but blues music especially, and we all have our ways of finding the blues.
For me, it was a circuitous path – as a newly transplanted immigrant to America, I was drawn to the Beatles. They were different from the stuff that most of my classmates listened to, and I was embracing my life as a stranger then. In studying the artistry of the Beatles, I began rooting around for their influences.
That’s how I discovered B.B. King. Then Muddy Waters. Alongside Abraham Lincoln, it was figures like B.B. King and Muddy Waters that made me want to become American, even as I struggled as an outsider, or perhaps precisely because I was struggling as an outsider.
This was the soundtrack of my formative years, raw and passionate, and I’ve carried my love for it through my life like a flickering light.
Even if you don’t love the blues for some reason (though it’s never too late to start), Sinners will take you for a goddamn ride. Other people are more qualified to speak of the resounding success of a young Black director in our reactionary era – never forget, Coogler also made films like Black Panther – but what I am most qualified to speak about is when a movie rocks my face off.
Funny and tragic, mystical and sexy as fuck, Sinners is also a shining, original story in a sea of remakes and sequels and prequels. Look, I’m not angry about remakes and sequels per se, I like watching writers and directors play around with old, beloved characters. But old characters are also just considered financially safe for movie studios, and there can be something so exhausting about safety.
Haters may suggest that Sinners is “just another vampire movie,” but where in the hell have you seen vampires descend on the grand opening of a juke joint in Jim Crow-era Mississippi? And when was the last time when a vampire storyline challenged you, really challenged you, to consider the notion of spiritual salvation and what it means to unite with your fellow man (or fellow vampire, as the case may be) and how our souls long for fellowship and togetherness?
When I think about Sinners, I keep coming back to the idea that some of our best memories can come wrapped in the utmost horror. Joy exists within pain, or maybe pain exists within joy, and Sinners captures the searing sweetness of memory completely, and it does so with humor and tenderness, a rarity for a film that also comes soaked in torrents of blood.
Both horror and the blues are nighttime genres, and there is a tremendous beauty to the way Sinners portrays the Mississippi night; languid and dangerous, a pocket of America that’s too often belittled when it’s not being ignored, filled with pain and also, with love.
I think this film will ultimately be viewed as a true Southern touchstone, right up there with the works of Flannery O’Connor.
And it will also be an all-American cultural touchstone, because that is its deserved trajectory. As fun as Thriller, as heartbreaking as The Great Gatsby, Sinners is an instant classic and, if you haven’t seen it yet, I hope you are in the process of ungluing your ass from that couch.