Blues Brothers - Sinners programme notes

I wrote these programme notes for Glasgow Film to coincide with the release of Sinners in April 2025.

In just over a decade Sinners writer/director Ryan Coogler has become one of the most successful filmmakers in the world, carving out the sort of enviable career path that suggests he’s in this for the long haul. Winning Sundance right out of the gate with 2013’s Fruitvale Station — a politically resonant true-life story that gave Michael B. Jordan his first leading role (they’ve now made five films together) — he immediately set his sights on Hollywood and promptly became the first first Black filmmaker to direct a billion-dollar-grossing hit thanks to 2018’s Black Panther, a genuine cultural phenomenon and the first full-blown superhero film to be nominated for the best picture Oscar.

What’s been fascinating about Coogler’s meteoric rise, though, is the extent to which he’s preserved his own voice. The road from indies to blockbusters is littered with directors who got a shot at the title and had nothing to say or couldn’t find a way through the corporate doublethink of big budget filmmaking with their sensibilities intact. Not Coogler. Creed, his second film, revived the on-the-ropes Rocky franchise by slyly flipping its racial politics and reframing the mythology to emphasise the importance of Apollo Creed for an audience that previously had to make do with watching the series’ thinly-veiled Muhammad Ali proxy get put in his place by Sylvester Stallone’s great white dope.  

His two Black Panther movies, meanwhile, may have slotted smoothly into the increasingly convoluted Marvel Cinematic Universe, yet Coogler still made some bold choices. How many other Disney films up until that point would think to introduce their villain (also played by Jordan) delivering a pointed critique of colonialism as a pretext to robbing a cultural institution like the British Museum? Or how about the way the he drew on the legacy of Afrofuturism across both movies in his conception of the fictional African nation of Wakanda, which he posited not just as a tech-rich utopia, but one that has to shield its very existence to protect its culture, resources and people from—plus ça change—the plundering imperialist proclivities of the western world? In Coogler’s movies Black lives matter, and so do the way they’re presented and represented on screen. Alongside Jordan Peele he’s fundamentally transformed the way blockbusters can operate — no mean feat in such a risk-averse mainstream movie culture.

Which brings us to Sinners, his fifth movie, his fifth collaboration with Jordan, and his first fully original film. Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932, it stars Jordan as twin brothers named Smoke and Stack, a couple of enterprising gangster siblings who’ve returned home after toiling away for seven years in Al Capone’s Chicago to open a juke joint in their home town with their aspiring blues musician cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton). We already know from the ominous opening shots of a bloody Sammie returning to his preacher father’s church—broken guitar in hand, head full of nightmare images—that something terrible has happened. But as the movie unspools the calamities of the previous 24 hours, Coogler serves up an audacious period horror movie that embraces vampire lore and blues music and combines them into both a wildly entertaining ride and a sophisticated deconstruction of the legacy of slavery, one that exposes the rigged nature of the American Dream, not just in the era of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan, but far beyond.  

Like zombies and body snatchers, vampires are a robust allegorical tool in this respect and they’ve had a small role in Black cinema too, giving blacklisted Shakespearean actor William Marshal  employment in the campy, yet politically charged, blaxploitation hits Blacula (1972) and Scream Blacula Scream (1973) and providing initial fuel for Marvel’s emergence as a cinematic juggernaut with the Wesley Snipes-starring Blade trilogy (1998-2004). Here, Coogler uses vampirism as a metaphor for the racist institutions that seek to subjugate those they fear or can no longer control, either through violence, or through the more insidious forces of appropriation. But it’s the deft way he links it to music and the birth of the blues that deepens and enriches the film, complicating  obvious interpretations by making the lead vampire (Jack O’Connell) an Irish immigrant folk musician, one with his own history of oppression and a vision for an integrated society that’s as sinister sounding as the soulless rendition of country blues classic Pick Poor Robin Clean that we hear him play at key point in the film. 

Indeed, we’re told early on that music is a kind of supernatural force that can simultaneously provide healing but also attract evil — and blues fans will no doubt note the Clarksdale setting as the location of the fabled crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil in return for fame and fortune. But Coogler isn’t interested in simply regurgitating that particular legend, perhaps because this foundational myth in Black American music has already been thoroughly appropriated by Hollywood in the form of the Walter Hill film Crossroads (1986), which not only retold the story from the very white perspective of a blues-loving classical music student played by The Karate Kid’s Ralph Macchio, but also featured a soundtrack composed by Ry Cooder and White Snake’s Steve Vai. As a character says in Sinners: “White folks, they like the blues just fine. They just don’t like the people who make it.”

In contrast, Coogler turns Sinners  into a more complex exploration of the difficulty of carving out a little bit of freedom to exist on your own terms, a dream he articulates in the film’s most audacious moment when Sammie’s music makes good on the promise of the film’s opening voice over declaration that music “can conjure spirits from the past and the future”, something Coogler then brings full circle with an end credits cameo for blues legend Buddy Guy (be sure to sit right through to the end for a Marvel-style stinger). 

But don’t mistake this for some kind of elevated horror thesis in search of a movie. In interviews Coogler has been upfront about the influence of Robert Rodriguez’s Quentin Tarantino-scripted vampire film From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) on its bate-and-switch structure. And the film’s other influences run the gamut Jeremy Saulnier’s punks-v-nazis siege film Green Room (2015) to the raptor attacks in Jurassic Park (1993), to Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), particularly the way the latter balanced intimacy, sex and horror. When it gets down to it, Sinners is full tilt fright flick in which the presence of vampires raises the intriguing question of whether eternal damnation or eternal salvation is preferable when reality is already Hell on Earth. In the current moment, it’s feels like a movie designed to unnerve everyone.