You’ll get several movies for the price of a single ticket in Ryan Coogler’s (Creed) period drama-thriller-romance-musical Sinners. And while some of these disparate elements are more successful than others, the combination is audacious enough to leave you simultaneously awed and overwhelmed by his outsized ambitions.
All of this, remarkably, is packed into a single day in 1932 Mississippi, a place filled with cotton fields and Klan members. Maverick twins Smoke and Stack (both played skilfully by Coogler muse Michael B Jordan) have finally returned home after a law-eliding sojourn in Chicago. They’ve got money, liquor, and a dream: to open a juke joint for their friends and family, a place to safely connect, conspire and pitch a wang dang doodle on a Saturday night.
Everyone in their tight community plays a role, including their teenage cousin Sammie (musician Miles Caton), blues singer Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), Chinese-American grocers Grace and Bo (Li Jun Li, Yao), and the twins’ old flames Mary (an underserved Hailee Steinfeld) and Annie (standout Wunmi Mosaku).
It might not be a Marvel movie but Coogler is making an epic here – and everyone is up to the task. The settings are stunning, the music stirring and the party scenes electric. In one gorgeous, metaphysical moment, Coogler draws across centuries and continents with breathtaking scope, passion, and poetry. See it in IMAX if you can, and stay for the credits.
It might not be a Marvel movie, but Coogler is making an epic here
All of this intensely detailed artistry does make the sharp turn a little jarring when the night is interrupted by… vampires. And though Coogler does offer some interesting hints at their inception and intentions, they’re still the red-eyed, garlic-fearing type that need to be dispatched in ultra-bloody fashion. So from here the movie turns into pulpy genre horror, pitting the partiers against a group of undead white folk singers from dusk ’til dawn.
Few filmmakers can handle a range of genres better than Coogler, and he masters the action with enough assurance to thrill grindhouse fans. But he’s already painted this corner of the segregated South so effectively that the supernatural (and metaphorical) menace can feel cumbersome – particularly as it takes our attention away from the very real world he’s already evoked.
Vampires can be vanquished. But human villainy, the sort that never seems to die? That’s the stuff on which eternal nightmares rest.
In cinemas worldwide Apr 18.