The New Yorker:

Ryan Coogler’s vampire movie mines vampirism’s symbolic potential to tell a tale of exploitation and Black music in nineteen-thirties Mississippi.

By Richard Brody

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the bloodstream, along comes a new horde of vampires, in Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” to taint it with yet another metaphysical curse. But Coogler is, by temperament, an analytical filmmaker: his first feature, “Fruitvale Station” (2013), dramatized a factual case of police violence; with “Creed” (a “Rocky” sequel) and the two “Black Panther” films, his artistry advanced as he mined mythologies for their political substance. In “Sinners,” he deploys gory fantasies to undergird his realistic vision. The film’s vampires are essentially metaphors, and the bodies they ravage are, above all, bodies of work and the body politic.

Indeed, until Coogler’s sanguinary predators show up, midway through, “Sinners” plays as a work of minutely observed historical fiction. It’s set in the Black community in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the course of the day and night of October 15-16, 1932—which is to say that it’s a historical horror film, because its reality is scarred by the horrors of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. The drama starts with a young man named Sammie (Miles Caton) driving up to a church and stumbling into a Sunday-morning service led by his father (Saul Williams); Sammie’s face is bloodied and gashed, and he’s holding a snapped-off guitar neck. Thus, from the start, Coogler brings together music and horror. From there, after a title card announces “One day earlier,” the movie unfolds as a flashback, filling in the events leading up to Sammie’s agony.

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