REVIEW: "Sinners" is a mesmerizing, wickedly good, genre-crossing triumph.

Sinners Poster.

Just the movie we needed on a spring Easter weekend: a Black vampire horror musical that spans six decades in the 20th century. This isn't Blacula. Nor is it The Color Purple or D'Jango Unchained, though there are elements of each of these movies in Sinners in tone, production design, and social messaging.

Writer/director/(and now) producer Ryan Coogler had me at "hello" over ten years ago with his stunning directorial debut: the groundbreaking independent film, Fruitvale Station, based on the true story of the wrongful 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant by a Bay Area BART police officer. The film also introduced Michael B. Jordan as Grant, garnered well-deserved Oscar buzz and collected a slew of awards, including Best First Feature for Coogler from the Independent Spirit Awards.

Despite its critical success, Fruitvale Station never captured the attention of Oscar and received no nominations the following year. If you still have my 2014 Oscar picks (and, if you do, please let me know who you are), you might have noted that I moaned about Fruitvale Station being grossly snubbed and ignored, that it should not have been passed over so nonchalanatly by the Academy.

Coogler and Jordan moved on to other, bigger budget movie projects together, including Creed I and II and both Black Panther films (two of the few Marvel Comics films I have seen). Sinners marks their sixth collaboration, moving them into Scorsese-DeNiro territory (Marty and Bob have made ten films together to date), in what is becoming a powerful, symbiotic cinematic partnership.

Sinners, the story of the Smoke Stack brothers (both played by Jordan), identical twins who return home to the Mississippi Delta after military stints in World War I and a subsequent stay in Chicago where their fabled connection to gangster Al Capone scares and intrigues locals. Loaded with money they reportedly stole from the mob, the brothers purchase an abandoned sawmill from a racist landowner named Hogwood with plans to open a juke joint.

Their young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton in his first feature film role), an aspirising blues guitarist, eagerly joins their efforts to open the establishment, despire warnings from his preacher father that music is the instrument of the devil, saying, "You keep dancing with the devil, one day he's gonna follow you home."

Coogler is a masterful storyteller, parsing out information about Smoke and Stack's past with precise timing, teasing the audience with details about former deeds and relationships, layering with keen dexterity themes of racism, social justice, and the supernatural. By the time they appear, the vampires don't seem incongruent or out of place: they are seamlessly woven into the story's narrative, adding another allegorical tier to Coogler's treatise on good and evil.

Jordan's dual portrayal is nuanced and riveting. There is more to distinguish Smoke from Stack than their style of clothing: Smoke is quieter and dresses in blue; Stack is more flamboyantly clad in red. Each carries a different type of sadness and regret, and Jordan deftly balances the two personalities with carefully crafted mannerisms and vocal inflections. It is a tour de force performance, something that has become a signature of Jordan's, even though he often goes unnoticed when award nominations are announced. Here is one of the finest lead actors around - if you haven't seen Creed or Black Panther, check them out - who has not nearly received the accolades due him for the past decade.

The supporting cast, including Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Musako, Jayme Lawson, and Jack O'Connell are all fine as an ensemble, especially given the movie's genre-bending characteristics. In particular, Caton's turn as the impressionable Sammie, has touches of sweet naïveté juxtaposed with a longing to break out and break away from his father's stern, conservative grasp. At times, wearing slightly tilted cap, his face in half-shadow, Caton resembles blues icon Robert Johnson, who famously sold his soul (and music immortality) to the devil at the Crossroads. In the movie's epilogue, we see Sammie's story come full circle. I'll say no more, as giving away too many details in this smartly complex script might ruin the experience.

Overall, this is Coogler's show, and he manages to integrate the sometimes over-the-top gore and gallows humor associated with horror movies with carefully placed musical numbers, placed against the social motif of the American south in the years between the world wars. At times, the movie evokes the sprawling cotton fields and sepia tones of The Color Purple (both the1985 and 2023 versions); the interior scenes and natural lighting reminded me of scenes from D'Jango Unchained (2012).

Beyond these kinds of stylistic comparisons, Coogler emerges with his own unique voice, filling every scene with a kind of sensuous vibrancy that keeps you enthralled for the movie's entire 138 minutes. Every frame is filled with such powerful emotion and energy that film seems to ooze with sumptuous delight. You can feel the sex, the passion, the desire pulsating as characters interact and the story unfolds. Underscoring the film's allegory is the music which becomes, in itself, a character, signaling racial differences as well as spiritual invitations. That both God and the devil are present is a given, as the struggle between good and evil penetrates the action, influencing every grand movement and tiny gesture.

Some of you know from my blog posts that horror movies are not my thing, but I've seen two fine ones in the past two months that suggest I may need to reconsider. Though I can always do without excessive violence and bloodletting, I still love a good story told well, and Sinners, like last year's The Substance, use the horror movie genre to raise other, deeper questions about social mores and cultural practices.

Let's hope the deconstruction of conventional movie genres continues. Coogler has already established himself as a fine writer-director, and Sinners is a stunning achievement that not only emulates the lyrical audacity of last year's brilliant Emilia Pérez, it adds new and invigorating storytelling techniques that keep you engaged and riveted.

I can't beieve I'm saying this, but I think I may need to see Sinners again. It's hard to tell if Sinners will still be in the mix by the end of year's awards nominations, but it should be. This blood-sucking, toe-tapping, sexually-charged fable of twin brothers on a collision course with Satan demands further thought, analysis, and interpretation.

PS Without giving anything important away, remember to stay through the credits, or you'll miss the full arc of the storyline. Sinners is definitely worth the extra few minutes.

Don't miss it.

Sinners is currently playing in theaters. It is rated "R" for "gun, stake and fang" violence.