Giv­en the uni­ver­sal rev­er­ence Sin­ners has been afford­ed, and the fact that the trail­er promised a bog-stan­dard vam­pire flick direct­ed by some­one whose pre­vi­ous cou­ple of efforts had been at the behest of the Mar­vel brethren, I sat down to watch Sin­ners with min­i­mal expec­ta­tions, con­fi­dent that I’d be get­ting back up to leave after about 30 min­utes or so. How refresh­ing to be proved so thor­ough­ly wrong.

Nom­i­nal­ly, we’re in Clarks­dale, Mis­sis­sip­pi, but real­ly we’re in the same ter­rain that gave us Damon Lindelof’s scin­til­lat­ing Watch­men (reviewed by me ear­li­er here) and Scorsese’s deeply irre­spon­si­ble Killers of the Flower Moon (reviewed by me ear­li­er here).

This is a world where hon­est, hard-work­ing black and brown skinned peo­ple are robbed blind by their white neigh­bours, deter­mined as they are to per­sist with their delu­sion of racial supe­ri­or­i­ty. Sin­ners, then, is a revenge movie.

Iden­ti­cal twins come home with the ill-got­ten gain they’ve amassed after work­ing for the Chica­go mafia, bent on open­ing up a juke joint so that their black and brown skinned broth­ers and sis­ters can enjoy them­selves of an evening, in exact­ly the same way that their white neigh­bours can.

But that is not a world that those white neigh­bours are will­ing to allow come into being.

As with any supe­ri­or genre film, it’s what you see going on beneath the sur­face that ele­vates it. Inge­nious­ly, direc­tor Ryan Coogler homes in on music as the means for dis­tin­guish­ing the film’s two antagonists.

Once the film set­tles down, the lines seem to be clear­ly drawn. Inside the juke joint are our heroes, the black and brown skinned men and women per­form­ing and entranced by the devil’s music, the delta blues. And on the out­side, and try­ing to get in, are the blood-suck­ing vam­pires, who are con­gre­gat­ed with­out, lis­ten­ing to their music.

And yet, things are far murki­er than first they seem. The music that the 12^th cen­tu­ry Irish vam­pire leads them on is every bit as majes­tic as the music with­in, and is clear­ly viewed that way by the film mak­ers who frame it so lovingly.

The gor­geous, del­i­cate Will You Go Lassie Go is even­tu­al­ly super­seded by the rol­lick­ing on The Rocky Road to Dublin, which is clear­ly intend­ed as the coun­ter­point for those out­side, to the regal I Lied to You, which rep­re­sents the apoth­e­o­sis of the blues for the peo­ple with­in, link­ing as it does the delta blues to hip hop via Hendrix.

The point being, the one is not her­ald­ed at the expense of the oth­er, both are cel­e­brat­ed equally.

And the fact that the vam­pire had orig­i­nal­ly come from 12^th cen­tu­ry Ire­land mat­ters. That makes him a man who, before he’d been ‘cap­tured’, had orig­i­nal­ly been rebelling against the only recent­ly arrived Eng­lish, in exact­ly the same way that these 20^th cen­tu­ry black Amer­i­cans have been forced to rebel against the all too recent real­i­ty of slavery. 

So there is as much that con­nects them as there is that divides them. In oth­er words, this is a cin­e­mat­ic world that is any­thing but black and white.

The same thing hap­pens with the film’s end­ing – and if you’re wor­ried about spoil­ers, stop read­ing here and come back after you’ve watched it. But we are talk­ing about good ver­sus evil, and the con­ven­tions around that are fair­ly unsurprising.

On the sur­face, good tri­umphs over evil and the bad­dies get their come­up­pance. But that’s not the feel­ing you come away with when you find your­self think­ing about the way the end­ing unfolds.

It’s the good­ies, the blacks with­in, who are over­come by the whites with­out, and who are even­tu­al­ly forced to inte­grate with them, by join­ing them. But how could it have been oth­er­wise, giv­en the intox­i­cat­ing nature of the siren sounds the vam­pires were send­ing forth? And after all, Irish beer real­ly does taste won­der­ful, even if it does dull the sens­es and cloud the mind.

So all they are left with, ulti­mate­ly, is their music, the blues. Every­thing else has been appro­pri­at­ed. Which is where the film ends up, with its post-cred­its end­ing. It’s not so much a revenge film then, as it is a film of failed revenge.

Except it isn’t. That’s how the film’s sto­ry ends. But the very exis­tence of a film like this is that revenge deliv­ered. Crewed and cast and from the per­spec­tive of black peo­ple, with black sig­ni­fy­ing good, strong, and hero­ic, and white evil, threat­en­ing, destruc­tive and preda­to­ry, the film visu­al­ly recal­i­brates the dic­tio­nary def­i­n­i­tions of black and white we were pre­sent­ed with in Spike Lee’s Mal­colm X.

With­out force feed­ing us clum­sy sym­bol­ism, and with­out ever for­get­ting to enter­tain us along the way, the very exis­tence of Sin­ners rep­re­sents a small but mon­u­men­tal step in that nec­es­sary path to revenge.

Change has come, at last.

Watch the trail­er for Sin­ners here:

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