As Forrest Gump would say, vampires and nightclubs go together like peas and carrots. Mostly because of the whole daylight constraints of the vampire lifestyle, but it is more than that. It is the sexiness and seduction. It is the revelry and indulgence. Losing yourself in the music, sweat, and booze at a nightclub might be humanity’s closest feeling to being immortal, and the vamps themselves do not seem to mind that these revellers do not have their sharpest wits about them. Sinners take a little bit of time to get to the vampire-nightclub collision, but it is surely worth the wait.
The film first starts in 1932 at (essentially) the end. We see Sammie (Miles Caton) peeling into church in a car by himself, covered in blood, carrying the neck of a guitar which has no body. Clearly there is a story about how he got here, and we are about to find out.
Sammie’s older twin cousins, Smoke and Stack (played in a dual role by Michael B. Jordan) return to town after a tour in German in WWII and a mysterious time in Chicago to open a juke joint. The men have a bit of money to invest, and they are using it to bring lightness to their home community in the deep south. First thing on the list is to pick up Sammie and his guitar and begin to assemble the rest of the entertainment at Club Juke. This primarily means picking up the drunken bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) at the train station and enticing him to leave his regular Saturday night gig to play at their place.
Though there are occasional ominous tones and moments of personal joy and freedom, the entire first half of Sinners is exposition and world building. Writer/director Ryan Coolger is gearing up for a complex and loaded second half, and all the players must be introduced.
Coogler is no stranger to creating dimensional and complex cinematic worlds. He helmed both Black Panther and Creed, both of which required adherence to historically weighty worlds. Here, Coogler gets to build his own world from the dirt up, and he takes his time crafting the experiences, sounds and smells that make his world whole.
One of the greatest driving forces of Sinners is the music. Composer Ludwig Göransson won an Oscar for his score for Black Panther in 2019, and won the same award for his work on Oppenheimer in 2024. His scores are immersive and adaptive, and he has a knack for saturating films with rich sounds to complement every mood and movement. Sinners is another beautiful standout for Göransson, though he sounds to be having a bit more fun experimenting with genre here. Rather than sticking to straight classical, big Hollywood scores, the music in Sinners jumps around a bit. One moment it might be the typical string section lulling the audience into the romance on screen, but the next might be a riff (pun intended) on heavy metal to crank up the urgency and energy in a fight scene. The agnostic attitude toward music genre might be anachronistic, but it also feels silly to fact-check a film about vampires, which are famously fictional.
In addition to the score, the musical set pieces in Sinners are easily the artistic highlights of the film. Music is important to these characters, and the blues carry even more gravity in the American south in the 1930s. We see Sammie can play and sing early on in Sinners, but his major performance is transformative. The juke joint is hopping when he takes out his guitar and starts strumming, but it goes beyond that. Coogler shows that the festivity defies space and time, and that music connects ancestors and heirs alike. Visually the power and energy of this scene is intense and hypnotic. There are other musical performances in Sinners, but none quite capture the same cinematic magic as this incredible sequence.
But back to the vampires. Just as the sun is setting, a lone vamp appears at the door of a farmhouse and gets down to business. He has plans to take over the town that very night, and wants to start with Club Juke. The Irish-coded vampires have a fest of their own outside the club, and do a darn good job with “Rocky Rock to Dublin” along with a few other traditional songs. Their patience eventually runs thin, and soon there is a mighty exciting blood bath.
Sinners has a small subplot involving the Klan, and it is clear that Coogler is set on establishing a parallel between vampires and those haters, but the message is lost along the way. There is a far greater amount of attention paid to the club and the vampires, and the race commentary feels almost like a shoehorned in afterthought. Having the vampires be Irish seems to play into the film only in terms of dance styles, as the low socioeconomic status of Irish in America at that time is never introduced in any way at all for commentary.
Sinners might not get to the action for quite a while, and might have made some confusing choices (e.g. there is no real reason for why Jordan needs to play twins) but it is so enchanting and barn-stomping, not everyone will notice the paced build-up. Music flows out of the film like the blues would flow out of the Mississippi delta in this era, and it is lush.
