Sinners is an angry, ugly film. It hits out, with no pretension to subtlety, at the elephants in the room where the American Dream is nurtured and deconstructed, such as racial harmony and the right to freedom.
It comes up with a bunch of conventional clichés upturning racial equations. The bad folks are the White monsters; every Caucasian in sight is a vampire or a potential vampire, and the ‘Klan’ (you know, the Ku Klux) is mentioned ominously. Later, some of the Black characters join the vampirical society that controls the destiny of the Black characters trapped in a large community hall where booze and blues music flow unstoppered.
The metaphor of Oppression versus Freedom cannot be missed even if you are blind to blatancy. Sinners are not high on subtleties. It doesn’t aspire to be. It hits a mean sixer by crossing boundaries, not obeying them.
When it comes to getting right the mix of horror, hilarity and underlined commentary on racism, the punctuation is never amiss. Writer-director Ryan Coogler gets to the other side of the moon and stays there. While the first half of the narrative goes through what is known in filmy parlance as warming up, post-midpoint, it is “us” against “them” all the way, with the aura of eeriness enveloping the dark nocturnal atmosphere in a spellbinding clasp.
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There is also that other elephant-in-the-room hurdle: the very charismatic Michael B. Jordan in a double role as the mutinous twins Smoke and Stack. This is 1932, Mississippi when racism is rampant. Nothing in Jordan’s behaviour suggests any nostalgia. Worse still, it is hard to tell one twin apart from the other. Since they are together on screen most of the time, for the audience it is hard to tell the actions of Smoke apart from Stack.
However, collectively, Jordan scores high as both the twins by making them seem like two halves in a hellhole.
Sinners is a triumph of technical acumen. The colour palette suggests an eroded moral construction. The 1932 era of stolen drinks and crashing dreams is well-balanced. Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s cinematography lets us peep right into the moral fissures that navigate the characters into their doom.
Some of the scares stack up into something resembling an event. And Jack O’Connell is particularly creepy in the way he sings and postures as a genteel soul. He is the mirror image of the hypocrisy and two-facedness that govern modern life. Call him a politician, a godman or a vampire, he is lurking around the corner.
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