Everybody’s talking about “Sinners.” The latest feature from Ryan Coogler has wildly exceeded expectations, earning $48 million in its opening weekend, inspiring incredible discourse online and continuing to sell out theaters almost a month after its opening. These sales have even compelled the team at Warner Bros. to rerelease the film in IMAX –– the wide-screen format on which it was shot and for which it was intended –– beginning May 15.
Indeed, “Sinners” is everything theaters have been missing and more. Set in 1930s Mississippi and telling the tale of one fateful night spent at a juke joint, the film is bold, intelligent and shamelessly original. With a stellar cast and an exuberant mode of storytelling, Coogler defies genre and convention in a film about music, about family, about racial tension in the Jim Crow South and, yes, about vampires.
Michael B. Jordan stars as a pair of identical twins, who make their triumphant return to the Mississippi Delta after a stint in Chicago, armed with funds of questionable origin and big plans to open a juke joint for the local Black community. Smoke and Stack are first introduced, in a shot rich with symbolism and foreshadowing, silhouetted against the backdrop of the building that will become the film’s primary setting.
Physically identical, the pair are styled with some notable differences, the cool Smoke sporting a blue scally cap and an everyman suit, while the fiery Stack flaunts a red fedora and a self-consciously suave three-piece ensemble. This dichotomy is integral to the film’s larger discussion of the self –– in pairing the classical twin motif with the visceral horror of vampiric transformation, Coogler interrogates identity, not as fixed, but as something fragmented and fragile.
From the film’s first shot, “Sinners” roots its audience in a stylized world that is simultaneously grounded and surreal. The script mirrors the structure of a three-act play, taking ample time to introduce the cast of characters –– most notably Sammie, a breakout performance from Miles Caton that also acts as a surrogate for the audience as a newcomer to this world –– and the circumstances under which they operate.
Coogler uses this extended exposition, not as filler, but as an opportunity to welcome his viewers into the world he has built. One particular sequence stands out as one of the most remarkable in modern cinema, as Sammie conjures the past and future of Black music through a captivating musical number executed almost entirely in a single shot.
In so doing, Coogler ensures that audiences are deeply invested in the characters and their wellbeing –– if only to make clear the stakes, no pun intended, for the arrival of the film’s first vampire, Jack O’Connell’s Remmick. Remmick’s first scene is terrifying, not only in its violence, but in the knowledge it threatens –– that the juke joint will inevitably become his next target.
His entrance marks a turning point in the film’s trajectory, the story transitioning into a largely continuous sequence centered around survival. Entering into the third act, all but six of the party’s attendees have been transformed. These six arm themselves with garlic and DIY stakes, and prepare for an imminent final battle at the juke joint which is just moments before a place of liberation and now is under siege.
Coogler is brilliant in his articulation of the dichotomous dynamics inside and outside the shelter, flashing back and forth between the fraught tension of the survivors to the unnerving exuberance of the vampires. So, too, does he perfectly capture the dichotomy between the twins themselves, Smoke and Stack, who are in turn able to serve, not just as two different people, but as parallel embodiments of the film’s core tensions.
Not only that, but Coogler is picking up on a theme shockingly relevant to modern cinema –– whether literal or metaphorical, twins and doubles are everywhere on the screen this year.
Theo James plays twin brothers in the Stephen King adaptation “The Monkey,” while real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara are slated to star as twins in the upcoming “Bucking Fastard.” Then, of course, there are the doubles –– be it clones, such as Robert Pattinson’s various iterations in “Mickey 17,” or versions 2.0, such as Margaret Qualley’s Sue to Demi Moore’s Elisabeth in “The Substance.” Even Marvel’s latest “Thunderbolts*” explores this theme to a certain extent, with Lewis Pullman’s character occupying dual spaces in the film’s narrative as both the hero and the antihero.
So, too, has television picked up on this theme. Apple TV’s “Severance,” a cult-favorite prestige series, explores the idea of doppelgängers in a more abstract manner, centered around a process that literalizes internal compartmentalization by creating two cohabiting but independent personas within one body.
In all of these spaces, these stories reflect a growing fascination –– or anxiety –– with the concept of identity. The double becomes a vehicle through which to explore what it means to know oneself, or lose oneself. Within “Sinners,” this idea is not limited just to the genetic doubling of Smoke and Stack, but even the unique mold of double that a transformation into vampirism creates. The original self remains familiar, yet what animates it is foreign, even violent –– a bodily metaphor for the loss of control.
By the end of the film, Coogler seems to be suggesting that doubling is not just a trope, but a condition of life. The vampire metaphor is purposefully messy –– one of the many threads of Coogler’s boundless passion, woven together in a story about love and music, identity and legacy and the fight for wholeness in a fractured world.
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