There’s a sequence in the middle of Sinners that’s such a breathtaking combination of music and imagery, performances and cinematography, spectacle and ideas, that my eyes were already full of tears before it was even over. If nothing else, that one sequence is why I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say that experiences like watching Sinners in IMAX are why cinema exists in the first place.
But I feel like saying anything more would ruin the magic of it, so I’ll pick another thing I love about the movie, which is how it’s so meticulously put together in a way that doesn’t seem at all sterile or artificial.
Walking into the theater, I knew that it was going to be odd to go to a movie and not have it start out with a trailer for Sinners. It seems like it’s run before everything I’ve seen this year, and possibly it started with teasers last year? It’s been an effective but completely unnecessary case of overkill in marketing, since I was sold from the moment I saw the trailer for the first time. You had me at “Ryan Coogler, Ludwig Göransson, Michael B Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, and Wunmi Mosaku1Although I admit at the time I only knew her as “that actress I really liked in Loki!” with a 1930s period piece about human-looking monsters attacking a nightclub in the deep south.”
I don’t know if it’s because I had trailers on the mind, but I gradually started to realize that the entire 2+ hour run of Sinners was constructed with the best qualities of the best movie trailers. Not that it was in any way cursory or slight, but that there was a sense of rhythm and clarity to everything. Every shot is chosen to be the most impactful image. Each scene has a clear purpose and fits exactly into its necessary place. Characters give an immediate sense of who they are, before you know their names or they’ve even spoken a word.
It’s worth calling out that last part in particular, since the introduction of Michael B Jordan’s twin characters Smoke and Stack was masterful. There’s a shot of the two of them leaning against a car, and you’ve already got a strong idea of each one’s character well before they’ve been named. And Jordan does such a fantastic job at inhabiting each distinct personality that you almost immediately forget that they’re both played by the same person. I just plain stopped even thinking about “how did they do that shot?” moments, because they were clearly two different actors, obviously.
And like a trailer, the movie is filled with music. Not just as much as you’d expect from a movie featuring blues singers, and not even as you’d expect from a movie scored by Göransson. Music seems to be playing almost constantly throughout the scenes, when other movies would’ve let the score fade into the background to emphasize the dialogue. It never seems jarring or discordant — I was about a quarter of the way into the movie before I even realized there was more music than usual — but simply as if these characters are constantly surrounded by music.
There’s one scene where Smoke visits the home of his wife (?) Annie after years of separation. Annie decides to remake the protective mojo bag she’d given to Smoke before he’d left. Throughout, the scene has been set to an instrumental blues guitar piece, and as Annie is lighting a candle for the preparation, she strikes the match three times, each strike perfectly in sync with a note in the background music.
Sinners isn’t really a musical, even though there’s a ton of wonderful music throughout. It’s not really a horror movie that has breaks for musical numbers, either. The narrative isn’t told through the music, but is inextricably linked with the music. It’s difficult for me to even think of them as separate works of art, since even when it’s not the main focus, the music is such a huge part of how the movie feels.
In other words, much like a movie trailer. On the way home, I was actually trying to rein in my post-movie hype and figure out exactly why I was so blown away by it. Why I was sitting through the end credits thinking of nothing except for how much I wanted to see it again right now. It’s not some huge, sprawling epic. It’s not a special effects showcase filled with spectacle. It wasn’t breathtaking or adrenaline-pumping as an action movie, and it wasn’t all that horrifying for a horror movie. The music is excellent but none of it was in a style that particularly resonates with me. I liked all the characters but didn’t really love any of them.2But Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim and Li Jun Li’s Grace came close. And the ideas in the movie are wonderful but not perspective-alteringly profound.
What I realized is that, like the music perfectly coming in sync with Annie’s action before diverging again, everything in Sinners is perfectly combined. It’s got the attention to detail, pacing, and storytelling that has trailer creators working for weeks to distill the perfect encapsulation of a film into a minute or two, and it spreads that across two hours. The result is an experience that I didn’t just watch but felt.