"Sinners", and how to be very good and still let down

May 6, 2025971 words

Osnar Chávez

There are some weird times when you go to the movie theater, and you really enjoy a pretty solid movie, but still, you feel disappointed. It is like when you eat a dish you loved as a child, and still is pretty good and enjoyable, but it is a downgrade from what it was. That was Sinners.

In the 1930s, two twins (played by Michael B. Jordan) return from Chicago to the Mississippi plantation they grew up to open a juke club/bar for black people, which gets attacked by musical vampires and the KKK. The premise is pretty cool, since it was announced I was freaking in. Yet, this synopsis leaves a lot of things outside that clearly are not necessary to this tale, and when most of your picture is not really necessary, you are in serious trouble. And this problem flows to all the aspects of the film.

The cinematography, for example, is kind of unsettling. Like it works, but is not appealing nor unique. There are a couple of shots that I had never seen before, like the back of the car focused with the front seats unfocused, but nothing more. The lightning is boring and uninspired, even the golden hours feel pretty shallow. Like, there was no need for this movie to be filmed completely on IMAX. No shot in this movie was something deserving of being watched in a giant film frame.

Maybe the only thing that works is the music and sound design. Some scenes of characters just telling stories are accompanied by sound effects so subtly, that at first I believe the noise was coming from the audience, in a well achieved version of the Black Pearl's defeat in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. And Ludwig Göransson is absolutely amazing, his music fills every scene with personality and is clear that he has a lot of respect for the music he is inspiring in, as well as all the investigation mixed with his talent produces an outstanding score.

Sadly, the montage and direction fight against this. At the beginning the shots are really thought about, but when the plot starts everything goes to sh*t faster than Ezra Miller in Hawaii. The first scene, including flashes of other images remembering us of course of The Exorcist, which is truly uncomfortable. As well, the introduction of the twins, Smoke and Stack, is amazing: we saw in the dawn one of them resting on the hood of a car, and when the camera orbits around him to reveal the second twin, with a more loose posture and playful attitude you just get from the moment you saw them; it is absolutely clear what is the dynamic between them. Yet, when the plot starts, it becomes a very bland directed movie as any other blockbuster, and the montage cuts away from showing everything.

This becomes really infuriating in multiple levels. First of all, even the climax (or the first one with the vampires) turns away from what is happening. Most of the scenes when someone gets turned are cut before anything happens (just in one case justifying it by a jump cut when a door in one scene transforms into another door in some other time and place). I do not get why this happens, part of me is sure that is because Ryan Coogler does not know how to work with VFX, so they look for cheap ways to cut from there, and other part is that him and/or the studio are really afraid or uncomfortable with showing very explicit things, which is weird because there is a lot of sex and blood, so I do not quite get it. I want to believe this was the goal all along, that this is intentional, but taking into account the difference between some gorey sexual moments and others so directly avoided is hard to understand what was the purpose of this. It stays in the middle ground between something explicit and violent, and something more psychological and low-key disturbing.

Ecen with all that, what I do not get, is the script. I mean, it works, but it also has like all the amateur mistakes you could make. It takes half a movie to present the characters and get the plot running, before that we just see everyone interact with each other in reiterative scenes, not even taking advantage of the fact the main characters are twins and could work as proxies for each other. There is a never change in dynamics nor growing stakes, when in half the runtime the movie starts having a plot that works in the most direct and uninspired way that makes clear why it had to took so long for it to arrive to this point. And, all the themes never connect to each other, the vampires are never killed by music, what the characters learn has nothing to do with what happened, and having three climax, the plot one first, a character one based on plot points never constructed next, and a character resignification on a post-credit five minute talking scene really just do not work. Every scene has a very particular purpose, and that is the problem, the script is not able of generating one single climax to resolve everything, nor one single introduction scene, everything need to be overdone, which only distillates the impact and emotional investment you have on it.

Is pretty cool. Highly recommendable. But there is still something very amateurish and poorly achieved below it all. Is just like a vampire, attractive and shinny at first glance, but when you pay attention you realize it is not that handsome, the shine is cheap glitter and it just turned out you are a horny teenager with serious daddy issues.