Part of the risk with Sinners is that it conforms to no existing horror structure. The conventional approach would be to open with the juke joint fully operational, corral the characters inside, and then raise bloody hell for ninety minutes before spitting everybody, hopefully sated, out into the night. Instead, Coogler builds the film his way, finding a structure of his own, as distinct from the rigid superstructure of the MCU, and then filling it as he wants. Yes, there will be more or less conventional genre thrills, but before the film gets there, it has unusually meaty character business to work through (again: horror-plus), establishing these folks' relationships to one another, to money, and to an America that is more broadly as white as the cotton picked in the surrounding fields. Here, Sinners starts to shape up as not just merely timely - landing, as it does, in a moment when the whitest White House in recent memory is doing all it can to erase any trace of Black history (and any sense that Black lives matter) from the books - but acutely personal, for just as Peele used the shadow selves of 2019's Us to reflect upon his own upward mobility, Coogler appears to deploy his two gangsters and the naive guitarist Sammie to ruminate on the tradeoffs he's had to make to get where he now is, on top of the box office. Eyebrows have been raised in some quarters at the tone of the trade papers' coverage of Sinners - the stress reports have placed on how much the film cost to make and market, and whether it's a hit or a hit with a sizeable asterisk attached to it. (What's being insinuated is whether a film by a white filmmaker and featuring a largely white cast would attract similar scrutiny.) Yet it strikes me as an extension of the haggling that goes on within Sinners itself. One reason Coogler got this leftfield project over the line with the executives: it is largely about business, its internal tensions those of negotiation and gatekeeping. It's just that it's been directed by someone who knows this business is often cutthroat and draining, who's seen at least one fellow creative waste away in the process, and is thus more engaged than most with the costs - financial and spiritual - of putting on a show.
The miracle of Sinners is that it emerges not as jaded or wearied but supremely entertaining, as a studio film that for once has a lot going on under its roof, very little of it tiresome. As opposed to the crashing obviousness of modern superhero movies or the time-honoured rituals of the Creed franchise Coogler similarly launched, every gesture and character here retains some element of mystery: we're never entirely sure where these people have come from, nor exactly where they're headed - the Robert Johnson stand-in isn't the only one at a crossroads - so we never get bored of them. And Coogler, for his part, keeps making interesting, idiosyncratic choices: merging the imagery of the crossroads with that of the crucifix, making the villains folkies yet still honouring their music, the insane amount of cunnilingus references. Elsewhere, he empowers others to make interesting choices in their turn. Jordan and Steinfeld get to play greatly more amoral than their pristine screen personas would usually allow; editor Michael P. Shawver cuts key sequences as if they were boundary-crossing music videos, suggesting some hybrid of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" or "Bad" with Donald Glover's "This is America". Here is this turbulent season's most forceful argument in favour of DEI: it's not just that Sinners is a different story, but that it's a story that moves differently, to a different rhythm or set of rhythms. (It's direction as remixing: the beats don't fall where you'd expect them to fall.) Does it bite off more than it can fully chew? There are an awful lot of strands to tie up heading into its climax: here, Sinners takes a turn for the Marvel, flailing around between disparate avengers, and not affording us the time to mourn the loss of the fallen, as a Carpenter or Romero would. Maybe that's why Coogler has felt the need to tack on three alternative endings: some Tarantinoid wish fulfilment, as if the director were remaking From Dusk Till Dawn, Django Unchained and Inglourious Basterds simultaneously; a note of sentiment visible nowhere else in the picture; and a terrific little vignette, buried at the very end of the closing credits like an artist's signature, which lands on the simple truth of why people enter into showbusiness in the first place. We get our money's worth, at any rate: surprising, densely packed (scrub out the asterisk: here is the kind of movie movie that stokes repeat business and grows a devilishly long tail) and self-evidently the film Ryan Coogler wanted to make, Sinners is a fine advert for affording our creatives a free hand to spend the cash whichever damn way they choose.
Sinners is now playing in cinemas nationwide.
