Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
It's one of the nuttiest damn things in recent memory, and for that alone I want to like Sinners more—I feel almost churlish saying the movie is all over the place when "all over the place" is clearly a goal, a way of creating madcap energy that demands you meet the film on its own terms. But the flailing genre-mashing seen here plays closer to the chaos of Everything Everywhere All at Once than the surgical attack of Get Out, and I guess this dampens the achievement for me.
Nevertheless: Some of the madness sticks. In 1932 Mississippi, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) arrive back home after an extended sojourn working for—and apparently ripping off—Capone-era gangsters in Chicago. They purchase a shack in the country, prep it as a juke joint, enlist a young blues genius (Miles Caton) to play there, and secure the illegal hooch needed to put on the party. They must fend off the local Ku Klux Klan, of course. Also, vampires.
Yes, this is part of writer-director Ryan Coogler's genre-splicing. And in this film—which is a musical, of sorts—while the Black characters are pouring out the Delta blues, the white vampires are kicking out classics of Irish folk music. In fact, the movie stops to let cracker-vampire chief Jack O'Connell do some Irish step-dancing as he leads a troupe of undead pickers and grinners in a ghoulish round of "Wild Mountain Thyme." That comes close to being the movie's dizzy high point, more so than the blues number that, being so profound, conjures up various ancestors (African, Native American, Chinese) in a spirited but rather cornball "It's a Small World" variation.
Not only are there splendid people on hand, but a bunch of them get to sparkle: Hailee Steinfeld as Stack's troublesome ex, Wunmi Mosaku as Smoke's hoodoo-slinging ex, Delroy Lindo as a boozy musician, Li Jun Li and Bao as local shopkeepers, and O'Connell doing a zany turn that could possibly get him banned from Ireland. They go off like isolated firecrackers, not so much like members of an ensemble. If some of my descriptive language here suggests a certain helter-skelter momentum, forget it—Sinners seems longer than it actually is, with digressions along the way and a lengthy postscript (more than one, in fact) that seem inspired by focus-group workshopping rather than organic necessity. I did enjoy one coda that updates the characters by a few decades, which at least feels bluesy.
Speaking of time, the fact that everything in the film proper is supposed to take place in one day is a stretch: Smoke and Stack evidently buy the juke joint, outfit the place and bring in the musicians, and get the BBQ feed in gear in about 12 hours or so. And okay, maybe we're supposed to swing with that because it's a fairy tale (the digital cotton fields backdropping the sharecroppers certainly look unreal enough), but it's questionable even within the movie's outlandish parameters.
One thing I don't get, even if I were to go along for the ride and ease up on the nitpicking, is how underlit everything is. There are a lot of people here whose faces I would like to see, especially in moments of great import, but the movie does not make that easy. Mood is one thing, but this level of obscurity is perverse.
April 25, 2025
