In the Flesh: Sinners

“I miss my people,” says the vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell, more than reminiscent of the late, great Bill Paxton) to young Blues guitarist Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). “You can bring them back.” It’s not blood that Remmick wants, or at least not just blood, but music. Stories. A party that never ends with guests who never have to leave. “We had it all figured ‘til you killed Annie (Wunmi Mosaku),” the undead Elias “Stack” Moore (Michael B. Jordan) tells his twin, Elijah, known as “Smoke”. In his mind, it’s not his initial murder of Annie that counts, but the second one, the one she herself begged Smoke to promise he’d give her. It’s immortality with all the dignity of a kid who doesn’t want to give up his turn on the swings, but beneath the pettiness of it is a real need, a hollow, aching hole of want for something true and beautiful. Remmick may still have his music, as he demonstrates by singing and dancing along to ‘The Rocky Road to Dublin’ in a truly lightning-in-a-bottle sequence, but it doesn’t do for him what Sammie’s does for the patrons at Juke Joint. Every time he whispers “fellowship and harmony”, you know with a deeper certainty he can’t feel either anymore.

There are problems with Sinners, to be sure. The vampire exposition is clunky, the pacing in the second and third acts has plenty of hitches as we seesaw through overlapping action sequences. There’s some thematic drift as Coogler tries to communicate exactly what his vampires stand for while making their screen presence fit with the music and set pieces he’s got in mind. The CGI in the final confrontation between Sammie and Remmick leaves something to be desired. But the music? Ludwig Göransson’s score is unimpeachable, and every single scene in which the characters are singing or playing feels like wildfire. As Sammie’s preacher father (Saul Williams) puts it with trembling scorn, people are drinking corn liquor and sweating on each other, and Coogler makes you feel it. The pounding rhythm of feet scuffing over bare boards. The bright twang of steel guitar strings. The booming cough of gunfire. Again and again, he finds an auditory path to make you all but certain you’re right in the middle of it.

Jordan excels as both twins, but it’s Mosaku and Caton who run away with the film, aided by a fantastic turn by veteran character actor Delroy Lino as aging Blues musician Delta Slim. His anecdote about the long-ago death by lynching of a friend, from which he segues into song after being overcome by emotion, is a near-perfect tone setter. Black music is alive, its past and future vital and inextricable from the broader cultural fabric, but it carries pain with it. A history of loss so huge it can only be processed by transformation into music, a language above language. And the sex! Coogler lavishes that same attention to detail on every instance of skin on skin. When Sammie tells Pearline (Jayme Lawson) not to wipe the sweat off her inner thighs before he eats her out, the dirty thrill of it feels electrifying. When Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) spits in Stack’s mouth, or the beautiful, statuesque Annie takes Smoke into her arms, it’s like the film has grabbed a live wire. With all that in its corner, it’s not hard to forgive a little shaky CGI.