Sinners is a genius fusion of period drama on race with vampire horror and music

Every so often you get really lucky. Sometimes a film actually comes along that has serious intentions, has a lot on its mind, is keen to correct some wrongs, wants you to leave feeling like you’ve learned something and doesn’t forget to be as entertaining as heck.

In fact, it’s so entertaining – funny, dramatic, scary, ribald and musical – that those serious intentions go flying over your head.

All you know is that you’ve had a rip-roaring good time and it’s been in a world that is such a fresh take on standard genre tropes that you feel like you are watching something brand new.

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That’s Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s latest film and it’s a thrilling statement of confidence in his ability to tell his own stories on the grand canvas that’s normally reserved for the big franchise pictures he’s made like Creed and Black Panther.

Coogler’s muse, Michael B. Jordan plays dual roles – the identical twin gangster/businessmen, Smoke and Stack. Determined to never get stuck on a cotton picking sharecropping farm in Mississippi, they went off to World War I and came back with the tools and ambition that would see them rip off all sides of the Chicago mob and come home loaded.

As we meet them, they are buying an old sawmill with a dream to run themselves a juke joint featuring the town’s great musicians, local delicacies and fine liquor from up north.

The business plan shudders a little when they find that many of the locals can only spend the wooden nickels they get from the plantation owners – this is the period of Jim Crow when African-Americans were nominally free but economically still enslaved.

To make matters worse, the good times at the sawmill have caught the attention of an Irish vampire (played by Jack O’Connell) who is determined to get a piece of the action – if only he can persuade Smoke and Stack to let him in.

Stack’s ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) becomes the first of the night’s victims.

Jordan’s star power makes Smoke and Stack the most exciting characters, but they aren’t the heart of the film, not really. Fantastic newcomer Miles Caton plays Sammie, a talented young singer and musician, ambitious to make his fortune in the recording studios and clubs of Chicago, going against the wishes of his preacher father. It’s Sammie’s talent that produces the music that can transcend everyday life but also attract the undead.

All the while, we are captivated by Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s stunning 65mm cinematography – so different from the gritty and grainy lens flares of The Last Showgirl earlier this year – Oscar-winner Ruth Carter’s costume design and Ludwig Göransson’s music.

But the real star of the show is the virtuosity of Coogler, the balancing act of the laugh-out-loud funny moments, followed by extraordinary fantasy sequences and then classic horror jump scares.

Interestingly, these vampires don’t think of themselves as monsters, although they offer a monstrous bargain – eternal life as the ultimate rejection of colonisation, a message that might have some appeal to the former slaves of Mississippi, the neighbouring Choctaw Nation or the Irish. They’re not deterred by Christian relics, as if it’s a ridiculous belief system that has no place in their reality.

So, the question remains. If the characters in Sinners are neither targeted or saved because of their faith – and the central character ultimately rejects the church despite everything he’s seen – who are the Sinners in Coogler’s film?

The chaos and carnage of the lost juke joint – and all the lost lives within it – is a kind of allegory for Black life. They’re not allowed to simply exist - to live their own lives, with their own culture, music, food and religion. Someone is bound to come along and wreck it. The last word spoken in the film is “freedom” and that’s what was briefly on offer before it was destroyed by two kinds of parasites – the vampires and the Klan. Smoke’s final Tarantino-esque, ahistorical, retribution is an empty but satisfying gesture.

Note: Find the cinema with the best sound possible and – under no circumstances should you leave before the very end. I was the only one left in the cinema for one of the most beautiful codas to a film I’ve seen in ages.

Sinners is rated R16 for violence, offensive language and content that may disturb, and is screening in cinemas all over New Zealand now.