Cinematic Sins

For weeks now, I'd been hearing people sing the praises of the new movie Sinners. Director Ryan Coogler left the MCU behind (but brought his longtime collaborator Michael B. Jordan with him) to deliver a horror movie that wowed the critics and beat box office expectations.

Set in 1932, Sinners is the story of twin brothers Smoke and Stack, who return to Mississippi from mob work in Chicago. There they hope to set up a successful juke joint of their own. They reunite with the locals and recruit people to help, including their young cousin -- an unnaturally gifted guitarist they want to play at their club. But the brothers also have to contend with local racists looking to shut them down. And vampires.

I debated just putting that last part out there like that, because when you watch the movie, it's a slow reveal. The total run time is nearly two hours and 20 minutes, and fully an hour has elapsed before there's even a whiff of anything supernatural at play. Yet the "twist" has been widely circulated, that this is really a From Dusk Till Dawn style bait-and-switch movie where an entire story is set up only to be annihilated by the arrival of vampires.

It's too much of a slow burn, if you ask me. The movie, of course, knows where it's going. And so it never completely engages with the ideas raised in that opening hour. When a landowner (who might be a Klansman) figures prominently in the opening minutes, you assume he's going to be an antagonist throughout the story. And while the story does eventually circle back, Sinners doesn't seem to want to engage with racism as directly as, say, Get Out or Blink Twice.

But the movie does have a more interesting take on its vampires. That's where the metaphor resides in Sinners, contrasting the community of the segregated South with an unexpected version of a vampire community. (I think I'll skip any more detail and leave that twist unspoiled.) And once Sinners really becomes the horror movie it was meant to be all along, it's an over-the-top, violent bloodbath -- a slasher that hides no grisly details from its audience. It's perhaps one of the reasons that horror fans have embraced it. Another might be the unique (so far as I know) take on how you get vampires in the first place.

Still another is probably the cast, which is uniformly strong. Michael B. Jordan gets the spotlight, of course, in his twin roles -- in which he gives two very different performances. But there's also great work here from Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, and more. The characters are more interesting than just their utility as meat for a slaughter.

Once you get to the heart of the movie (because it's almost literally been ripped out to display beating in front of you), Sinners is a well-made slasher. But there's a reason slasher movies don't usually run longer than two hours. I was short on the patience this one demanded. I give Sinners a B-. If you're a horror fan wondering if this movie is worth the hype, you might want to check it out. If you're not a horror fan, wondering if the hype is worth you stepping out of your comfort zone? I'd skip it.