Demons in Our Midst
Weapons, Sinners

Miles David Moore

Two of the most popular films this summer were variations on the familiar horror plot of small towns beset by mysterious, threatening forces. Zach Cregger’s Weapons uses a non-linear plot to keep audiences guessing as to why all but one of the third-grade class of Justine Gandy (Julia Garner) raced out their front doors one night and disappeared. Far more ambitious, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners seeks nothing less than to delineate the entire Black American experience through the story of vampires menacing a Mississippi juke joint in 1932.

Weapons opens with the running of the children, precisely at 2:17 a.m. The next morning Justine, suspecting nothing, arrives at her class to find only one child—Alex Lilly (Cary Christopher), a quiet kid who had been a target for bullies in the class. A month goes by, and there is no trace of the missing children. Marcus (Benedict Wong), the school principal, tries to assuage parents’ fears, but the parents are convinced Justine is responsible—none more so than Archer Graff (Josh Brolin), whose son Matthew delighted in bullying Alex.

The mystery brings out the worst in the adults. Archer clearly needs some anger management counseling, as evidenced in what he does when he sees Justine’s pickup truck. Justine, meanwhile, finds solace in vodka and in resuming her affair with Paul Morgan (Alden Ehrenreich), a married, alcoholic police officer. Justine also worries about Alex and his safety; she follows him home one day and finds that his handsome Colonial house is to all appearances deserted, the windows covered with newspaper. 

Complicating the story is James (Austin Abrams), a homeless drug addict and literal thorn in Paul’s side. Snooping around for houses to rob, James stumbles on the location of the missing children and sets out to collect the reward money.

There is much, much more to Weapons, but very little that can be discussed with anyone who hasn’t seen the film. This includes the identity of a crucial character, played by a well-known actress, who makes her first appearance halfway through the movie.  Suffice it to say that Cregger paces the film brilliantly, revealing information in minuscule increments until, finally, the story explodes in our faces. The story’s buildup is so spellbinding, and the performances so persuasive, that audiences can be forgiven for feeling slightly disappointed in the revelations at the end. But Weapons is still an effective funhouse ride, giving viewers ample opportunity to jump out of their skins.

The shocks also come fast and furious in the last half of Sinners, but although Ryan Coogler is a master at filming scenes of terror and bloodshed, Sinners is only secondarily a horror film. The true horror, Coogler tells us, lies in the brutality and oppression Blacks have faced throughout American history, and the antidote to that horror lies in the efforts of Blacks to make their own
music, tell their own stories, and determine their own lives.

Sinners begins with narration: “There are legends of people with the gift of making music so true that it can pierce the veil between life and death.” The film then switches to the morning of Oct. 16, 1932, in the town of Clarksdale, Miss., a place renowned as the birthplace of the blues. Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), a preacher’s son and aspiring blues musician, drives up to his father’s church and enters. Sammie is scarred and bloodied, holding a broken guitar neck. Sammie’s father (Saul Williams) embraces him and exhorts him to abandon the music of Satan.

The action switches to the day before. Sammie’s cousins Elijah and Elias (both played by Michael B. Jordan), identical twins nicknamed Smoke and Stack, have returned to Clarksdale from Chicago, where they worked for Al Capone. They are sick and tired of working for white people (“Chicago ain’t nothin’ but Mississippi with tall buildings,” one of them remarks), and they are back in Clarksdale to set up, as one of them says, “a juke joint, for us and by us, just like we always wanted.”

Smoke and Stack buy a dilapidated sawmill from a local Klansman named Hogwood (David Maldonado) and go about recruiting townsfolk to help them open the juke joint that very night. Sammie and Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) will provide the music; Chinese shopkeepers Bo (Yao) and Grace (Li Jun Li) the groceries and signage. Sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) will be the bouncer, and Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke’s estranged wife, will cook. Relations between Smoke and Annie are strained; Smoke doesn’t hold with Annie’s Hoodoo practices, and the death of their infant daughter has left both grieving. As Smoke says, “I ain’t never seen no ghosts, no magic. Just power.”

The plans for the juke joint comprise the first half of Sinners, and this part of the story underscores the burning need of the non -white residents of Clarksdale for something to call their own, without whites ruining it. Delta Slim puts it succinctly: “White folks like the blues just fine. They just don’t like the people who make it.” This helps explain the stir caused by the appearance of Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack’s ex-girlfriend, a mixed-race woman who passes for white. That Stack and Mary still have feelings for each other is evident, but their racial divide poisons everything.

The juke joint opening contains the high point of Sinners, indeed one of the most energizing sequences in any recent movie. As the narrator prophesied at the beginning, Sammie and Delta Slim make music that transcends the veil, bringing both the ancestors and the future descendants of the dancers onto the dance floor.  We see griots, rappers, breakdancers, even the Chinese classical dancers from Bo and Grace’s distant past. It is a magical moment, bathed in color and light, the music reaching a joyous crescendo.

Unfortunately, it also attracts the Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) and his newly turned acolytes Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke). Remmick, declaring his love for Blacks and desire for racial unity, requests admittance to the juke joint, showing off his singing and step-dancing skills for good measure.  What ensues, of course, is a fiery bloodbath, staged thrillingly by Coogler, who puts his Black Panther skills to good use here. 

Sinners is resplendent both visually and aurally, thanks to cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, editor Michael P. Shawver, production designer Hannah Beachler and composer Ludwig Goransson. The musical talent on display is marvelous; Caton is a real find, and the great Buddy Guy appears in the film’s quietly chilling coda. The acting is similarly excellent, especially Jordan--Coogler’s go-to star since Fruitvale Station—and O’Connell. Smoke and Stack are like tempered steel, strengthened by enduring everything the white world threw at them. But they never counted on vampires. Remmick makes his goals plain. “We want your stories,” he tells Sammie. “We don’t want your songs.”

In the end, Sinners is the story of Black music, history and tradition surviving the twin threats of annihilation, as represented by Hogwood, and expropriation, as represented by Remmick. It’s hard for an old white guy like me to see Coogler present this thesis so starkly. But given Black American history in general and the events of the last ten years in particular, it’s even harder to see how Coogler could have argued anything else.