‘You keep dancing with the devil… one day he’s gonna follow you home...’
Vampires are back, baby! 2023 saw the release of The Last Voyage of the Demeter, but it was Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu in 2024 that really brought the notorious movie monster back from the dead. And now, Ryan Coogler brings us Sinners. It’s crazy to think that vampires still have such a stronghold over the multiplexes a full 94 years since the release of Universal’s Dracula in 1931. Sinners draws on the Dracula myth, but it shares more DNA with From Dusk Till Dawn than anything else…
We begin with a cold open of preacher’s son, Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), stumbling into his father’s church covered in blood and with deep cuts across his face. We then flashback to Sammie meeting up with his cousins, twins Smoke and Stack Moore (Michael B. Jordan pulling a double shift), on their way to open a juke joint in an abandoned saw mill in Clarksdale, Mississippi. We see the twins gallivanting around Mississippi recruiting old friends and former lovers to work in their place (Miles Caton, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Delroy Lindo et al) and then… Jack O’Connell shows up playing one of the coolest vampires ever committed to film. A word too for Hailee Steinfeld who steals every scene in which she appears.
Despite the obvious structural similarities to From Dusk Till Dawn, Sinners is very much a unique slice of horror cinema. Except it isn’t a horror film. Not really. It’s a musical… kind of. It’s a period drama… I guess. And it is this genre-straddling, mind-bending narrative that makes the film so damn compelling. It’s also Coogler’s finest hour. I didn’t care much for Black Panther, and while I love the Creed movies, there was nothing in that franchise to suggest that Coogler had something like this in his arsenal. The film has an ethereal, woozy quality that blends magic realism and the harsh realities of life in the American South in the 1930s to devastating effect. The juxtaposition between the bright yellows and oranges inside the club with stark blacks and greys outside perfectly captures the difference between the vivacity of the living and the unfeeling emptiness of the dead. Frequent Coogler collaborator Ludwig Göransson produces his best work yet on a score that is certain to win big come awards season – the mixture of live performances and sinister instrumentation is honestly breath-taking at times and it is in the musical sequences that Sinners really comes to life.
Sinners genuinely offers a completely new take on the vampire subgenre whilst also serving as confirmation that Coogler has now entered the upper echelon of modern Hollywood filmmaking. This is the kind of film that you want to rewind and watch again the second the credits have finished rolling. Pure cinema.
