Review of Sinners (2025)
Seen in 2026.
In 1932, twin brothers return from WW1 and a decade of organized crime in Chicago to their home town, to start a blues club.
It would be wrong to say that the vampires in this movie are wholly traditional. They are undead, they do require an invitation, they are vulnerable to garlic and sunlight, they are sensitive to a stake through the heart, they are metaphysically evil, they do not age, and anyone they bite will die and turn very quickly. That is all traditional, and nonsensical in the context of this fiction where history still proceeds as we know it. It is not smarter than Vampires (1998).
The vampires in Sinners are non-traditional only in that they espouse a lively sense of community that extends to a literalized racial memory. This is a premise that could have worked as a fearful metaphor for the spectre of communism in the Great Depression, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), but that is not how Ryan Coogler uses it. Instead, the same premise is turned around to comment on the predatory capitalist regime of the USA under Herbert Hoover. I read the community of the vampires as a metaphor for the monocultural melting pot: It is a real and organic culture, but it still functions as an evil caricature of the more specific West-African-to-North-American racial and cultural identity that drives Ruthie and connects the other heroic protagonists.
Sinners’s vampires have a profound and genuine appreciation for traditional music, and I don’t mean Transylvanian music. They love music like the living do, and for the same reasons. That adds a note of ambiguity that does not exist in Vampires, and I welcome it, but I do think its potential is wasted. The comedy of Sinners is also different, being more self-conscious. The musical uchronia of the centrepiece at Club Juke is a laugh-out-loud funny piece of kitsch.