With 'Sinners', Ryan Coogler proves he is a master juggler of genres

I did not expect to think about, out of all the films, Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused, a film diametrically opposite in tone and vibe to Ryan Coogler's dark new original horror thriller, Sinners. The reason is simple: Linklater's film had a group of high schoolers gearing up for a "grand" party. In the moments leading up to the party, the excited youngsters get enthusiastic about the prospect of having a liberating experience away from the shackles imposed by their parents. It was a simple, hilarious coming-of-age film.

Sinners, too, is about characters yearning to feel liberated and independent, in the form of the twins with different personalities, played by Michael B Jordan. It also happens to be a coming-of-age drama, and this realisation hits only a while after we have completed the film, including the mid and post-credits scenes. Writer-director Ryan Coogler's weaving of multiple genres and themes is so remarkable that it takes a while to get some sense of the film's overall behaviour and intentions. We see gangsters. We see white supremacists. We see Blues musicians. We see mystics. We see preachers. We see vampire hunters. We see Black people feeling empowered.

Sure, there is much to praise about the immersive, IMAX-friendly experience (shot by Coogler's frequent collaborator, cinematographer Autumn Durald Akapaw). But the film also gets us to care about its strong emotional core. Coogler's storytelling approach impresses in the manner in which he dispenses pieces of information about his characters' backgrounds. He gives us stories both seen and unseen. Note the moment in the car when Delroy Lindo's Delta Sim recounts a horrifying incident in which his friend, a fellow black artist, was tortured and killed by a group of white men. Here, Coogler seems to be combining two storytelling forms, one with moving images and the other evoking the radio days when the 'realistic' audio narration had to be 'enhanced' with our imagination.

We also learn that the twins, Stack and Smoke, used to be in the army and later worked in Chicago as members of the infamous mobster Al Capone's gang. Where did they find the cash to buy a sawmill — soon to be turned into a juke joint — from a racist white man? There's the implication that the brothers robbed someone powerful, possibly Capone himself, that doom has been following them from the beginning. But the film doesn't have a specific morality-bound rule about who gets to live and who gets to die.

By now, I've seen Sinners twice. I firmly believe it's one of those films that reveal a new layer with every revisit — I get the feeling I might see it again. The film offers a near-transcendent experience for anything willing to go deeper. But it's not necessary to see it as something... deep. One is free to see it simply as a neat genre exercise. The haunting horror aspects, for example, brought to mind an excellent — but underappreciated — 80s movie, Dead and Buried. That garlic scene, for instance, reminded me of John Carpenter's The Thing; those mid-credit scenes got me thinking of Tony Scott's stylish vampire thriller, Hunger.

However, I find it impossible to see Sinners as a mere work of entertainment because its hold on me is so powerful that I cannot jot down every scattered and random thought into words. I imagine the impact it registered on Black people far outweighs that on folks from other communities. I mean, who would've thought that someone could find a way to slip in a veiled reference to cultural appropriation, among other things, into a horror thriller without making it seem out of place?

Just like how — in one fluid, mindblowing sequence — music conjured up some astounding visuals and becomes, for its characters, a medium for release, we can draw parallels to how cinema does the same for us. It's what Sinners did for me. To someone once told by a close relative that cinema won't do me any good, I could relate to that scene where Sammie, essentially the film's central character, is warned by his preacher father about the temptation of "the devil's music."   

Coogler mentioned in a recent interview that he is taking on the reboot of the immensely popular X-Files series. I think he is the right candidate for the job. Like Jordan Peele before him, Coogler has established, through Sinners, that he can be great at juggling multiple genres — and he has already proven his skill at handling big-scale spectacle in the Black Panther films and emotion-anchored storytelling in Fruitvale Station and Creed. So, I say, why not?

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