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 12th 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The gorgeous, delicate Will You Go Lassie Go is eventually superseded by the rollicking on The Rocky Road to Dublin, which is clearly intended as the counterpoint for those outside, to the regal I Lied to You, which represents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 12th 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 20th 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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