The Poppies of Terra #54 - The Wages of Sin

Cinema is alive and well. And no, I’m not talking about the virality of A Minecraft Movie’s chicken jockey scene, as culturally interesting as that might be. I don’t mean the financial health of movie theaters, either, but the vitality of the art form itself.

Sinners, the new film written and directed by Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), is an engrossing, beautifully produced historical crime thriller, a brilliant genre mash-up involving the blues and vampires, and a blood-soaked character study about the pursuit of freedom. From its opening frame to the final second of its post-credits scene (yep, there’s another scene after the mid-credits epilogue–do hang around), it’s powerfully conceived and lovingly designed. With the sensitivity and compositional elegance of early Terrence Malick serving the set-up, and a more muscular, agile directing style powering the juke joint sequences and the ensuing showdowns, it always manages to feel deeply personal. Michael B. Jordan delivers great work in a finely calibrated double performance as twins Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore, while newcomer Miles Caton impressively provides the picture’s beating heart and conscience. The supporting cast, including Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, and Wunmi Mosaku, are all inspired.

I don’t want to say much about the story. Sammie (Caton), the son of a small-town preacher in the Mississippi Delta in the 1930s, is drawn in by the blues, and is a hell of a player, but his father warns him that no good will come of it. After being gone for a number of years, Smoke and Stack Moore (Jordan) return home, purchase a sawmill, and recruit a number of colorful compatriots, including Sammie, to put on a grand shindig for the opening of their new juke joint. As the night wears on, the soul-melting music in the establishment attracts the attention of three passersby whose backstory reveals them to be both more, and less, than dead. “Let’s get nuts” is an appropriate summation of what follows.

A number of influences are perfectly blended into the narrative and re-invented for Coogler’s coming-of-age, coming-of-reality tale. Stephen King’s novel Salem’s Lot (1975) has to be mentioned; Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight (1995); From Dusk till Dawn (1996); Blade (1998); O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000); and maybe lesser known, Idlewild (2006). Some contribute thematically, others structurally. A title I haven’t seen referenced in this context is Mike Flanagan’s Doctor Sleep (2019), but surely there’s a resonance between Sleep’s Irish-descended psychic vampire Rose the Hat and Sinners’ Irish immigrant baddie Remmick. I also think Damien Chazelle’s spectacular Babylon (2022) should be mentioned, particularly for the virtuoso filmmaking in a club setting, involving incredible camera operatics against exuberant and sinewy musical live performances.

Which brings me to what I think may be Sinners’ most original element. Fundamentally, the entire film is a gospel testimonial, a supernatural ring shout, not preaching about any particular denomination, but celebrating a specific day in the lives of diverse characters thrown together by desire, fate, and a longing to let loose and exist in the moment. Michael P. Shawver’s editing, which contours every emotional beat, is the most thoroughly musical editing I’ve seen in a studio movie in a long time. I’m not saying the movie itself is a musical, mind you, but rather that inner and outer realities converge perfectly from scene to scene thanks to the sense of rhythm and even melody in Shawver’s cutting. Also noteworthy are the actual musical contributions by Ludwig Göransson and his troupe of collaborators. Every note resonates. 

Whereas Sinners is passionate, visually and aurally sumptuous, Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, Civil War) and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare is so restrained and stripped down it becomes almost abstract. Like the operation undertaken by the Navy SEAL characters it depicts, the film is, on one level, cold, ruthless, and methodical, a documentarian-like examination of the brutal conditions of warfare, both in its maddening tedium and bone-crushing eruptions of violence. On another level, it palpitates with unspoken dread and gushes with blood and fractured psyches. Lacking any musical score whatsoever, Warfare expertly leverages the power of enthrallingly subjective sound design, courtesy of Glenn Freemantle, to bring home the nightmare of the theater of war as collapsed into close-quarters combat. The events depicted in the film follow a meticulous reenactment, based on the corroborated accounts of the SEALs involved, of events that occurred in 2006, in Ramadi, Iraq. The performances by the young cast are uniformly on point, but our attention is captivated first not by them, but by their disappearance into a rigorously trained gestalt consciousness, and then later by their re-emergence as individuals, or fragments thereof, when the group mind is shattered. 

While Sinners undeniably contains elements of the horror genre, it functions just as effectively as an exercise in historical, spiritual truth-seeking, with the film’s vampirism working allegorically on at least three different levels (white cultural appropriation of blues music; Klan violence against blacks; the literalized otherness of immigrants). Warfare, on the other hand, which reasonably merits the label war film, soon occupies real horror territory. I’ve heard accounts of audience members hyperventilating and so on. Unlike movies such as Black Hawk Down (2001) or Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which craftilly command standard storytelling elements for their immersiveness, Warfare is an exercise in complete decontextualization. It’s a sneak attack. Expect no character development or traditional dramatic arcs. One film I have seen referenced in discussions of Warfare is Kajaki (2014), which I haven’t watched myself. 

These two releases, out on consecutive weeks, illustrate that even commercial cinema contains an incredible range of expressive possibilities. Both films are more than the sum of their journeys, missions, and parts. The wages of sin, as they say, is death. Rendered like this, may it live long and prosper.