SINNERS

Gareth Higgins on SINNERS

In Sinners, Black twin brothers return to Mississippi in 1932 after a sojourn to Chicago, flush with cash, to open a juke joint. Chicago’s as racist as the South, a “plantation with skyscrapers,” they say - better to build a life among the people and in the place they know. They buy a building and convene the village that will steward it - girlfriends, culinary magicians, bouncers, and of course the star musical act. It’s opening night, and away we go - if only they’d known about the vampires.

There’s something almost ecstatically demolitional about Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler and starring his constant collaborator Michael B Jordan. It demolishes tropes about the South - squeezing full-blooded drops out of a rural landscape where the trees and the old sawmill, the growing Main Street and the nascent general store operated from a humble home feel completely real. Full-bloodedness is necessary for reasons of both cinematic (and cultural) history and the plot. The former is more important, because so much “appreciation” of Black history among white people comes from movies and TV shows which skew the story in unhelpful directions.