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Ryan Coogler’s extraordinary horror entertainment Sinners opens with a sequence that hits like one of those question-mark blues chords, a what-the-hell-is-happening? clang that might be setting you up for despair or elation or both. The morning light around him looking weirdly malevolent, a young man stumbles to the door of a small country church, swinging the remains of a guitar in one hand. It’s just a ghost of a thing, really: all that’s left of the instrument is the neck, a jagged stick with a few busted strings sprouting from bloody tuning pegs, as if it has literally been played to death—or used as a murder weapon. The man’s cheek bears a set of still-bleeding claw marks, definitive as guitar frets. When he yanks that church door open, the preacher—we later learn it’s his own father—embraces him, relieved that this young man has returned to the fold, having slipped the clutches of whatever godforsaken evil had taken a hold of him. The young man’s trial is over. Or maybe it’s just beginning. The end of Sinners—or, more accurately, one of its two nested endings, one of which lands after the credits—will tell you which. And even then, you’re left with the feeling of not having gotten the whole story, as if it’s continuing to spin out somewhere beyond the movie screen.
What makes Sinners, set in 1932 Clarksdale Mississippi, so effective—so chilling, so hypnotic, and occasionally so grimly funny—is the way it yields to mystery, never seeking to overexplain. Coogler, who also wrote the script, sees how the present becomes the future in the blink of an eye, but also how the past, even as it may seem to shrink in the distance, never fully disappears. Sinners is about vampires, perpetual outsiders who desperately yearn to belong, but whose silky promises are rooted in treachery. Mostly, though, Sinners is alive to the mystery of music: the way, for centuries, white people and Black people seemed to hear and feel music differently,…
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