When it comes to centering the Black experience on film, director Ryan Coogler has carved a fruitful and unprecedented niche. Fruitvale Station reconstructs the final hours in the life of Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Oakland man killed by a transit cop on New Year’s Day. The Creed franchise tarries in the space between Black athletic genius and fatherlessness. The Black Panther franchise meditates on the relationship between Black Africans and the global diaspora. Now comes Sinners, a Jim Crow period piece that frames the Black experience in America as a horror show – complete with real scars.
The film, which made its theatrical debut over the weekend, follows Sammie – a young guitar hero (played by newcomer Miles Caton) itching to break away from his preacher father and the family church to play the blues for the unsaved masses. He gets his big break when his twin cousins (both played by Michael B Jordan) open a juke joint in their Clarksdale, Mississippi, home town with the ill-gotten gains they acquired during their stint working for Al Capone’s organized crime syndicate in Chicago. The pop-up grand opening, a major attraction for Clarksdale’s hard-working community of sharecroppers, offers them a hard-earned night-time catharsis until a trio of bloodthirsty vampires appears. That they also happen to be white is no accident.
