Streaming: Ryan Coogler's Sinners hits Crave
Ryan Coogler's film Sinners made a quick trip from cinemas to streaming — it's new on Crave — and, well, it's a trip indeed.
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Coogler's creative journey started with his first feature Fruitvale Station (2013, Apple TV+) starred Michael B. Jordan as Oscar Grant, an ex-con attempting to rebuild his life. It's based on a true story, with Coogler striving to humanize Grant in the 24 hours before he died at the hands of the BART cop who would shoot Grant in the back. Coogler next played with the Rocky franchise with Creed (2015, Prime) before taking on one of the more masterful entries in the Marvel Universe, Black Panther (2018, Disney+).
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Sinners feel like Coogler's most ambitious film, a long way down the line from the social realism origins of Fruitvale Station. Jordan (Coogler's most frequent collaborator) does double duty here playing twin brothers, named Smoke and Stack, who have returned to their Mississippi birthplace after scoring big, dirty money in Chicago. They buy a disused sawmill with the ambition of transforming it into a juke joint, with the help of young would-be bluesman Sammie (Miles Caton) and select members of their community.
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The brothers anticipate trouble from the Ku Klux Klan, but nobody expects the kind of trouble delivered by Remmick (Jack O'Connell), a drifter with his own vampiric designs on the juke joint.
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It is apparent Coogler was granted carte blanche to make the movie he wanted, which explains why it has the bravado elements of a musical as well as a Southern Gothic drama. It touches on Black history, but also Black mythology, offering its own take on the story of bluesman Robert Johnson, who purportedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for mastery of the guitar.
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But it's a horror movie first. As such, it's a film that warrants the viewing of another film to put it in a greater context.
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That film is the 2019 documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror, now playing on the genre specialty streaming service Shudder. In it, director Xavier Burgin makes the case that the horror genre best reflects the Black experience, although not always in a positive way.
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'We've always loved horror,' writer-educator Tananarive Due (an executive producer of the doc) observes at the beginning of the film. 'It's just that horror, unfortunately, hasn't always loved us.'
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The doc proceeds to demonstrate the sorrowful history of black characters in horror movies, often the first to die, and just as frequently sacrificing their lives so that the white hero may live. Scatman Crothers in The Shining is the film's example of the 'sacrificial negro' trope, double painful because the character in Stephen King's book escaped with his life. How interesting it is that Coogler pays a kind of homage to The Shining with a shot of a vampirically possessed character, as well as a scene which is essentially a replay of the blood testing scene in The Thing. ('My very first movie was The Thing,' actor Keith David proudly notes in the doc. 'And I lived all the way to the end.')
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