Sinners Review

By: David Imiruaye

When you listen to the blues, you can hear the pain in the fingers that strum the archtop guitars, and the horror that haunts the voices of freed men and women crying out into the void; we are both freed and entrapped by music, liberated and hunted, beloved and hated. Heaven and hell come together, love and hate, pain and joy; no other medium can capture this tragic duality more so than music. We express our greatest joys and most wicked curses along an infinite, unbending frequency. That frequency travels across time and space, intertwining with the souls of those who fall under its spell, transforming them from sinners to saints, and from saints to sinners. 

Ryan Coogler knows this better than anyone working in the entertainment industry, an industry that dangles on the same pendulum of good and evil that music does. An African American writer & director summons his love for creative storytelling, and infuses it with the embitterment, anger and fear trained into a black child from the day he or she is born. The narrative plays with this duality in the same way, dancing around the audience with whispers of genre; one moment a period drama, another a psychological horror, the next an electrifying musical. 

Not once does the story allow you to sit comfortably in your preconceived notions of horror filmmaking, for what is happening here lies beyond horror – this is a summoning of the ghosts of our pasts, and their ghosts in tandem. There is one particular sequence that exemplifies this, a moment that leaves the hairs on the back of your neck standing for the remainder of the story, not for the fear instilled in you, but for the sheer beauty and cosmic wonder unlocked inside your spirit. If you are fortunate enough to watch this tale for the first time on the big screen, you will know which scene this is the very moment it occurs, and it shall work its magic on you too.

The cast deserve a special mention too; Michael B Jordan stuns as the twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, delineating the difference between both brothers through his gift for vocal expression and physicality. Hailey Steinfeld delivers her best performance yet, as the once secret lover of Stack, returning to rekindle a flame that lay dormant for too long. Delroy Lindo hypnotises you with his comical, yet tragic portrayal of town drunk ‘Delta Slim,’ and Jack O’Connell frightens as our devil-to-be ‘Remmick,’ leader of the mob of vampires that come for our protagonists. 

Of all the great talents mentioned however, the shining star of this picture is none other than Miles Caton, who plays the younger cousin of the Smokestack twins, “Sammie Moore.” Here, Sammie has a talent for singing and playing the guitar so extraordinarily well that spirits from the other side are summoned to find him. Miles Caton plays the role with such raw emotion, wide-eyed naivety and a voice so powerful I began to feel the air in the theatre shift too. For this to be his acting debut leaves me stunned, as if the magic that followed his character has bled out from the screen and into our reality. We must welcome such incredible talent with gusto, as the future will be blinding for him – hopefully not too much so, as the vampires that hold the keys to success in Hollywood will hide themselves and all newcomers from sunlight, if eternal life is promised. 

Overall, I’d like to end this piece with a celebration for Ryan Coogler, not just for making the best movie of the year, but for securing ownership rights to this tale after 25 years have passed. This paves a way for passionate filmmakers to buttress themselves against the tide of reboots and remakes of studio-owned intellectual property – a tide that almost washed away the movie industry in the last decade. Though the effects of this deal may not appear groundbreaking today, it will be in the future, when we become ghosts for the emerging artists of tomorrow, especially the African American children, who will hum to the same frequency that we do, that our ancestors did, that their ancestors did. For time is a flat circle, and through music and artistry, can we listen to the ghosts of the past that paved the way for us, and speak to the children that walk across the shadows of tomorrow. Thank God for Ryan Coogler, thank God for his cast and crew and thank God for original movies.

In other words, we’re so back…