Director: Ryan Coogler

Stars: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Wunmi Mosaku, Jack O’Connell, Wu, Delroy Lindon, Li Jun Li, Yao Ryan

Coogler’s bizarre, overstuffed picture, a horror flick and commentary on race in America, which structurally and thematically looks to ‘From Dusk to Dawn’ may have worked as a persuasively blunt ninety-minute B-movie, but at two-and-a-quarter hours, it feels like an overwhelming muddle.

It is 1932 and sharply dressed twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan and merged seamlessly via CGI effects) are returning to their hardscrabble hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi. They had fought in Germany in the trenches in WW1 before making their way to Chicago where they worked for Al Capone. Stack is the more soft-spoken of the brothers, Smoke, brasher and more no-nonsense.

Shortly after arriving, Smoke and Stack buy a disused mill from a local redneck, probably ex-Klan, which they waste no time in converting to a Juke Joint. Then the brothers set about assembling musicians, choosing their preternaturally talented young cousin Sammie (Caton) aka Preacher Boy, an accomplished blues singer and guitarist; and Delta Slim (Lindo), a down on-his-luck harmonica and piano player. Also in the brothers’ orbit is the local Chinese couple, wife Grace Chow (Li) who designs their sign, and husband Bo (Yao); Stack’s abandoned haughty ex-girlfriend Mary (Steinfeld), who passes as white; and Annie (Mosaku), a doughty local medicine woman Smoke had had a baby with (which died) and who runs a small store.

The Juke Joint’s opening night goes like a dream which turns into a nightmare when a trio of white singers, led by the sinisterly ingratiating Irishman Remmick (O’Connell), turn up at the door pleading to be allowed in to participate.

It’s at this point that the picture switches from an elegantly sketched series of character portraits with a keen sense of time and place, into lurid horror mode as the undead descend on the Juke Joint. And it is here that the script nearly tumbles into incoherence with erratic editing, and dollops of exposition, mixed with moments of gory horror, frequently with misfiring humour.

Still, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s panoramic renderings of the Mississippi exteriors in the first half are lovely, and Ludwig Göransson’s eclectic score deftly combines trad music with more modern fare. This timelessness is also evoked in a pair of impressive musical sequences: a hallucinatory juke joint session in which the bluesy incantations summon figures from the past and the future; and a devilish Irish jig performed by Remmick and his burgeoning band of followers.

The script’s musings on assimilation and appropriation get a little lost in the melee, and a pair of mythos-buffing sequences which feature in the end credits feel unearned and presumptuous.

Sinners is released on 18th April.

David Willoughby

Follow David on Bluesky  @davidwilloughby.bsky.social