Ryan Coogler | Sinners / 2025

one bite after another

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ryan Coogler (screenwriter and director) Sinners / 2025

 

I can’t imagine what kind of reefer Hollywood Academy Award voters were on in nominating Ryan Coogler’s film Sinners for 16 awards, the most of any film in history. Perhaps some of that voting was the product of justified guilt for ignoring so many amazing pictures featuring black stories and casts over the years. And in some respects, it was inevitable that such a well-made movie with strong audience approval, excellent acting, historical significance, including a fair sampling of blues songs as well as early American Irish music should be showered with approval.

     Indeed, the first half of this film, featuring the return to Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932 of two World War I veteran brothers, Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan) to the Delta after work for the Chicago mob for seven years which has made them substantially rich is a fascinating period piece in which we are immediately immersed in the Jim Crow world of poor black cotton sharecroppers, hidden Ku Klux Klan members, Asian shop owners, along with a brief history of the Blues, which first found root in the Mississippi Delta. Smoke and Stack, tired of a world not so very different from the Delta, except that Chicago is filled with skyscrapers where the Delta is deep in plantations. They are also clearly on the run after apparently being involved in a heist from criminal syndicates.

     Violent as the gangsters with whom they have been consorting, they are nonetheless likable enough and made even more appealing by their desire to use their ill-gotten money to open a juke club in an old sawmill they buy from the Southern bigot and local KKK leader Hogwood (David Maldonado).

    Their first day back features them traveling around the area as they seek out provisions and a sign from Clarksdale grocers Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), and collect performers Sammie Moore, aka Preacherboy (Miles Caton), their cousin who plays guitar and sings quite beautifully and full of soul, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a local harmonica player and musical legend, and Pearline (Jayme Lawson) a married singer to whom young Sammie is immediately attracted.

   Along the way Stack verbally teaches his young cousin how to properly perform cunnilingus. Meanwhile Smoke visits the gravesite of his infant daughter and nearby his estranged wife, Annie (a standout Wunmi Mosaku), a Hoodoo healer, who insists the mojo bags she has given him and his brother has protected the two them. They also hook up for a quick session of anal sex that briefly restores what remains of their enduring love. Annie is furthermore procured to be the night’s cook. A heavy-set sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) is paid to be the joint’s bouncer.

    Along the way Sammie also encounters Mary, Stacks’ passé blanc ex-girlfriend who is furious for him having left her and arranged for her marriage to a while man, mostly, we discover, to protect her from discovery. But the trouble is that she is unhappy in the life she leads and wants a return of their former relationship, definitely dangerous territory for a black man in the Delta.

    In these few hours we get a sense of the entire community in a nutshell, witnessing the hard lives of almost all the Delta individuals of color and ethnic difference, including the Choctaw Indians hot on the trail of a dangerous Irishman Remmick (Jack O’Connell) who has saw protection in the house of a poor Irish couple, whose lean-to house is little better than the shacks in which the black sharecroppers live.

     And when the joint gets jumping, the liquor flowing, and we witness all too brief performances of Delta Slim, Sammie, and Pearline, we are all ready to sit back and enjoy a full history lesson in the importance of music, performance, and backroom sex in the lives of Delta blacks. With this cast of interesting performers who knows what might happen?

    But already in these scenes, director Ryan Coogler seems impatient with his carefully-researched and beautifully filmed story, pushing the envelope with what I see as a far too obvious and unnecessary history lesson about the influence of Blues by weaving in performers all the way from early jazz, rock, and hip-hop along with a DJ needle drop in sampling, as if he needed to hit us over the head to make it clear just how important the Blues where if fomenting and formulating musical traditions in this country. As critic Robert Daniels summarizes on Roger Ebert.com, describing Sammie’s performance: “his music becomes a phantasmagoria of African drummers, an Afrofuturist electric guitarist, and even Chinese dancers.”

    And while Sammie, Delta Slim, and Pearline seem to be all capable performers, we want to hear more without the theatrics, to actually hear them play and sing. What we are given are momentary segments much like the dancing in musicals such as Chicago where camera is so very busy that what we get is a blur of hands, torso, and legs instead of a full performance. To know the Blues, as it is clear Coogler does, you have to be given the time to fully listen.

    We immediately recognize, however, something hokey about this; the fine-tuned history has been usurped by the historian. And almost as suddenly he has seemed to lose interest in the period piece with which he has begun, shifting quickly and quite stumblingly into a new genre as the three Irish vampires knock the Choctaws have been hunting down come knocking at the juke place door.

     As somewhat of a specialist in genre, I have no problem with a healthy mix of literary or cinema forms. But as Daniels observes in his review:

 

“Vampire movies often struggle to be inventive. The formulas and mythologies of the subgenre are tried and tested, repeated and reworded: Stinging holy water, foul garlic, burning sunrises, and firm wooden stakes through the heart are the primary tools wielded against the undead. Oftentimes, the biggest change from story to story is merely the setting, whether it’s a far flung Eastern-European country, an American urban locale, or a stifling desert. Knowing those limitations, I have to give Sinners a sweaty, gory Southern Gothic horror musical, some credit. It’s a messy picture that throws the kitchen sink at the genre and, yet, somehow, often misses.”

 

    I also have no general complaint against the genre and have written extensively about the subject from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 masterwork, Nosferatu, Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula and George Melford’s Spanish version shot on the same set, to Carl Theodore Dryer’s Vampyr which appeared in 1932, the same year as the events in Coogler’s movie, into the several 1960s and 1970s lesbian suck fests by Jean Rollin, the 1979 Werner Herzog reconfiguration in Nosferatu, The Vampyre and numerous others. In a 2008 academic essay I even argued that just two years before the events in Sinners Mississippi writer William Faulkner wrote a brilliant kind of Southern gothic vampire work in As I Lay Dying. So I know something about the genre.

      In more recent decades, as the genre as become even more popular, it has alas often been confused and intertwined with the zombie movie, gory, bloody mass attacks that on occasion Coogler’s film seemingly mimics, even though Annie quickly perceives that the beings the survivors are facing ain’t not haints (a restless, often malevolent ghost or evil spirit), but these dead men and women still haunting their own bodies.

     I can also well understand, vampires or not, why the black partygoers at the Sawmill might not wish to easily invite in some white “friends.” As the Stack and Smoke make clear, if a black man stares too long at a white woman he will probably be subject to immediate arrest if not strung up on a hanging tree.

    But why choose the very next to lowest rung on the horrible Southern hierarchy, the Irish dirt farmers, as the villians of this piece?

     I also realize, of course, that the vampire films and fictions were most often metaphors for something else. In the beginning, the vampire was an illicit lover who instead of inseminating his victim with semen sucked out the vital juices of the desired lover (male in the earliest vampire’s example, although when he fails with Thomas Hutter he goes after Hutter’s wife) or primarily female in Dracula’s case. Overall, we might argue, however, that early vampires were, up until Rollin’s films female on female examples, equal opportunity sex fiends, bisexual men who didn’t much care from what sex they got their necessary blood. And in Sinners that remains true, the film showing us both men and women busily gnawing on members of the same sex.

    I am quite willing to agree with The New Yorker film reviewer Richard Brody that the vampires in this film represent the white desire to assimilate and take over black music (exemplified by the young Sammie, for whom Remmick has a particular attraction). But, I still don’t quite get the necessary Irish connection; were the dirt-poor Irish whites those most desirous to incorporate, assimilate, and steal from the black arts, particularly, given as this film shows us they have their own quite dark musical traditions, as in the midst of the vampire attack the original Irish trio and all of those who have already been “turned” stomp out some lovely Irish ballads?

     This group of vampires, moreover, seems to have developed into a same-thinking community who share one another’s thoughts like the human replacements of pod-people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

     Unfortunately, as Stack himself is transformed into a vampire by Mary, sitting atop him drooling with impatience for his blood, Cornbread turns enemy, and even Grace’s husband Bo Chow becomes a threat ready to return home to turn their young daughter into one of them, as the  vampires now claiming welcome into the juke hall, begin to look more and more like something out of The Night of the Living Dead and Robert Rodriguez’s From Dawn to Dust, cult pop films that in my estimation lack the subtlety and artistry of the first third of this film. By the end of this sequence, the dead and the living have pretty much ended up in a huge bloody brouhaha that might be described as one bite after another in humorous comparison to Paul Thomas Anderson’s film One Battle After Another of this same year.

   As the morning sun pops into view our vampires are burned alive, finally leaving only Sammie, Smoke, and a hand full of others still alive in living flesh and blood, Sammie having gone back home to his preacher father for forgiveness without, we soon discover, any intent to give up his music. And in this sense he is the true hero of the film, and the lone survivor of his Delta world.

     In short, Coogler has not so much “transformed” his original film or even extended it, as he has dropped down another work with similar characters upon his original movie like Dorothy’s house landing upon the witch in Munchkinland, blowing the first part of the film to smithereens like an angry gifted child grown impatient with being a truly restrained and talented artist.

    Even worse, he then quickly hurtles off from Marveland, a world of comic book pop-up figures, rocketing back to his early Rocky franchise, Creed (2015) wherein Smoke pulls out his tommy guns and Rambo-style shoots down the entire KKK crowd who come looking for trouble early the next morning. Even wounded and dying he does away with the final surviving bigot Hogwood, suggesting that what the Moore brothers were really seeking all along was just to be able to repeat the American pattern of violence and revenge, not create or sustain black art.

    As a reward for clearing out the Delta from the white bastards, he is transported straight to heaven where Annie and his infant child are waiting for his embracement.

     Is this really the masterpiece we’ve all been waiting for?

    But even then Coogler won’t give up, quickly transporting us in the early credits to a New York of current times where an older version of Sammie is now performing. After the show he meets up with two vampire survivors, Stack and Mary, now dressed in semi-Hippie attire, who explain that they were forbidden by Remmick from touching Sammy, now about to die in any event. Together they agree that on that long ago day, which Sammy describes as the best day in his life, they had finally really gotten their act together. Too bad Coogler didn’t let us truly experience it more fully before he thrust us back into the violent, racist world of today.

 

Los Angele, March 14. 2006

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2006).