Cinematic beauty as resistance: review of 'Sinners'

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners has amassed a record-breaking sixteen Oscar nominations, yet it was once widely predicted to be a disaster. After its huge success, critics have debated if the Academy will both overcome their resistance to horror films and award Best Director to a Black filmmaker for the first time. A decade on from the #OscarsSoWhite movement, can a film so steeped in Black history sweep the awards? There have been some positive signs, such as Michael B. Jordan’s best actor win and an ensemble cast win at the Actor Awards (formerly the SAG Awards). Actors make up the largest voting group in the Academy, so these awards can be a bellwether. Still, One Battle After Another, with its legible presentation as an auteurist art film and its deep interest in middle-aged white men, remains the Best Picture front runner. Sinners, by contrast, is a risk-taking film that reimagines the political potential of the vampire film.

Set in Jim Crow-era Mississippi, Sinners tells the story of charismatic twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Jordan), who return to their hometown from Chicago and open a juke joint. The juke joint creates a space of musical power and community and, as such, draws the attention of both the Ku Klux Klan and a group of Irish vampires. The Klan had never intended to allow Smoke and Stack’s enterprise to succeed, but they are pre-empted by vampire Remmick and his crew, who tempt the partygoers outside with Irish folk music. A gory battle ensues, in which the vampires promise immortality as a kind of freedom from oppression.

Vampire media has long been intertwined with histories of colonialism. Victorian Gothic literature told frightening stories of strange foreign figures who came from overseas to threaten “civilisation”, reversing the direction of imperial violence. Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the most influential vampire novel, imagined an insidious stranger, coded as ethnically other, who migrated to England and whose hospitality could not be trusted. Literary scholars have linked the popularity of Dracula to increasing public concerns about the British Empire. But Dracula also appropriated indigenous knowledge: Stoker’s research for the novel included travel writing from Malaya, where local beliefs included the vampire-like figure of the pontianak. The vampire in popular culture emerged from Stoker’s Anglo-Irish extraction of indigenous folklore and it’s thus not surprising that vampire films from postcolonial and diasporic perspectives have reworked these tropes. For example, Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Les Saignantes (2005) features vampiric women aiming to destroy the corrupt political order of Cameroon and Iranian-American director Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) imagines a chador-cloaked vampire taking revenge on violent men.

Sinners is vividly aware of these histories. Its opening sequence compares West African, Choctaw, and Irish musical traditions and the supernatural belief systems that resonate across these cultures. The vampire always travels, crossing borders and thresholds, and for Coogler, to tell African-American stories is to be attentive to complex trajectories of dispossession, solidarity and conflict. The film’s narrative is grounded in histories of racism, in the context of which the Irish vampires speak at once of long histories of British colonialism and of their assimilation to white power in the USA. We first meet the film’s antagonist, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), when he is being tracked by Choctaw vampire hunters, who recognise that he is not an ally. Remmick offers being turned into a vampire as a kind of freedom from racist violence, but the characters most attuned to ancestral knowledge, like hoodoo practitioner Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), reject this false promise.

The film’s central party sequence at the juke joint is a spellbinding vision of resistance to the vampiric oppression of white supremacy, in which the swooping, constantly moving camera, layered musical score and beautiful mise-en-scene deploy costume, performance, and dance to intertwine the past, present and future spirits of Black cultures. This scene evokes Saidiya Hartman’s concept of beauty as a form of freedom for African Americans, for whom “beauty was not a luxury, but like food and water, a requirement for living,” and yet it was “what the world withheld.” Countering the bloodsucking undead with these living spirits of communities past and future, Sinners animates an ongoing vision of cinematic beauty as resistance.