A blues hymn dipped in blood. Sinners plays like Southern Gothic sung through a cracked megaphone. It’s fable, fever, and sermon wrapped up into one of the most original horror films I’ve seen in recent memory. It’s set in the Depression-era South. In a murky, almost mythical world where faith, music, and ancestral ghosts all crowd the same creaky, wooden dance floor. This is also a vampire movie—eventually—and that isn’t even the strangest part.
At the center of the story is Sammie, known as “Preacher Boy” (Miles Caton). He’s a 19-year-old blues prodigy whose hands seem to have been born knowing how to work the fretboard. His father (Saul Williams) preaches damnation from the pulpit, but Sammie refuses to follow those footsteps, finding salvation instead through melody. Their house is a war zone between gospel and blues—between heaven promised and heaven found.
Trouble comes in duplicate form. In Sammie’s cousins, twin brothers from Chicago (both of whom are played—brilliantly—by Michael B. Jordan). The film’s twin effect is so seamless that I literally looked up to be sure that Jordan didn’t have an actual twin. They swagger in with bootleg liquor and a scheme to get rid of it by opening a juke joint at the edge of town. They drag Sammie and a broken-down piano man (Delroy Lindo) to provide the music. Lindo, magnificent as ever, really outdoes himself with this phenomenal turn as a man who’s played too many nights, buried too many friends, and drinks to drown the chorus of demons still singing in his head.
When these men play their music, the air around them bends. It descends time and space. Quite literally. One number summons things that shouldn’t be answering—spirits, maybe memories, from the past, present, and future—dancing themselves wild before the place burns (not figuratively).
You can feel the supernatural current running underneath the surface of the film from its first frame. But it doesn’t bare its teeth until the end. That’s when metaphor turns to flesh. I’m talking about vampires. The vampires are real, and the violence they bring is vicious.
It’s bloody, graphic, and often hard to look at. But there’s also a strange grace in the way it plays out. With music that soars, and horror that crashes in like a drumline gone mad, Sinners is extraordinary in the way it strikes an uneasy tremor between rapture and ruin. And the truth that it reveals is clear and cruel: that art, true art, might take you to extraordinary places, but it will always demand something from you in return.