Sinners

"You keep dancing with the Devil, one day he's gonna follow you home."

I don’t want to be hyperbolic, but this is my best movie of the decade so far. To the point where I looked up and went through lists of movies that had been released since 2020 to make sure that I wasn’t somehow forgetting one. I was not.

That makes this a very hard movie to review, especially without spoilers. There’s just so much that I want to tear into and spool out and luxuriate in that my brain just kind of ends up flailing around, levitating inside my skull, repeating “Best Movie of the Decade” over and over again before crashing down back into gooey, brain paste with the fear that I’ll hype the movie up so much that people will leave the theater wondering what drug I was on that made my brain buzz at hypersonic frequencies like that.

I want to go see it in theaters again, and wish that I was near an IMAX screen so that I could see it on that instead. I want it to show up on streaming so that I can just watch specific scenes over and over again and watch a different person during them each time. I want to write multiple, long, academic papers about it, the kind with footnotes and screenshots and probably a little bit too much pretentiousness.

I love this movie.

I love it in a way that I love very few others.

Set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta, Sinners follows twins “Smoke” and “Stack” as they return home from Chicago to open a juke joint, a place where their community could come to drink, dance, and gamble after working on cotton plantations, only for it to all come crashing down when three strangers arrive.

Smoke and Stack are both played by Michael B. Jordan, although if you had told me that Jordan actually does have a twin who just happens to also be a talented actor, I would have believed you. Like, I thought that the effects in Mickey 17 were impressive, but both Mickeys still felt like Robert Pattinson playing the role. I was always aware that there was movie magic trickery happening.

But here? Yeah, my brain was entirely convinced that there were genuinely identical twins there with no trickery involved at all. There’s this one moment at the beginning of the movie where the pair pass a cigarette back and forth in one, seamless wide shot and from that moment, I was sold.

There is just so much care and talent poured into every shot from a production standpoint on every single level. It’s not just the costumes, or the texture of the setting, or the acting, or the camera work, or the music. It’s all of them working in concert.

And the music.

The music!

There is so much music in this movie, and not a single note is extraneous. The opening lines talk about music and musicians who can pierce the boundaries between the mundane and the magical with their talent, and then the movie follows through.

The turning point in the plot is this gorgeous long-take over the course of a song that sent chills running down my body, and that isn’t just a turn of phrase. It actually jolted me because I distinctly felt the chills go from my shoulders, over my arms, and down my legs. It’s utter magic, matched only by its sister scene a little later on set to “The Rocky Road to Dublin.”

I’m half-Irish. Irish culture was a huge part of my life growing up. I learned Irish step dancing. Irish music can and will bring me to tears in a way that few other genres can. So that entire scene was very much perfect for me.

Now, depending on what trailers you’ve seen, you might know what the deal is with the strangers that show up to the juke joint. But some of you may not, so I’m dancing around the specifics just a little bit. But I really love the take on them. I thought that it was very clever and creative.

I especially love that Remmick, the leader, is so specifically Irish and that his Irishness informs who he is and what he wants just as much as other character’s Blackness does for them. He isn’t just a generic white villain. He’s Irish. And if you know your history, especially about how the Irish were first viewed and treated during their first wave of immigration and the interplay between that and the Black community?

My brain is levitating again.

Of course, it wasn’t perfect. Some people might find the first half a little slow, but I really didn’t mind that. It took my ear a few minutes to catch on to the Southern accents, so some of the dialogue slipped past me in the beginning, especially when the characters talk quickly.

I have bigger issues with the last act. The action was occasionally muddy and confusing, and fell into the same trap that a lot of horror and action movies fall into where characters get stupid because you need to whittle a lot of characters down very quickly. There were more than a few indulgent scenes that really could have been cut down a bit.

But even within the muddy and confusing, there were moments that I want to wrap pretty fabric around and bring home, like a specific fire stunt or the look of terror and heartbreak on Mary’s face.

Sinners is a horror movie. There is some excellent gore and effective jump scares. It’s an action movie involving guns, knives, fire, really everything you could hope for. It’s an incredibly sexy and erotic movie. (Josh Allen, you are a very lucky man.) It’s practically a musical. It’s about culture and spirituality and religion and assimilation and integration and race and pride and all of the places where those things meld together, and all of the places where those things kill each other.

I love this movie.

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An Honest Fangirl loves video games, horror movies, and superheroes, and occasionally manages to put words together in a coherent and pleasing manner.

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