#26: SINNERS

 

Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O'COnnell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Miller, Buddy Guy, Delroy Lindo and Li Jun LI. Written and directed by Ryan Coogler. Budget $100 million. Running time 138 minutes.

It's 1932 and identical twins Elijah and Elias, Smoke & Stack (Michael B. Jordan) return to Mississippi after 10 years working for Al Capone. Armed with a truck load of stolen booze and weapons the brothers buy up an old saw mile from a Klansman before recruiting friends young and old to run the Juke joint, including Sammie 'Preacher Boy' Moore (Miles Caton) - a young and up-and-coming guitarist, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) - childhood friend of the brothers and ex-lover of Stack, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) - the mother of Smoke's dead daughter, and Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) - an alcoholic blues legend drinking himself to death between sets. Together this disparate group friends and family convert the old saw mill and get ready for their opening night. However when sinister Irish folk singer Remmick (Jack O'Connell) and his two companions turn up late in the night and ask to be let in, the night quickly escalates into a genuinely unsettling supernatural slaughter-house as the white interlopers reveal themselves to be vampires. 

From the look and feel, to the superb music from Ludwig Göransson, the excellent acting and direction, Sinners is an absolute delight from beginning to end. It's reminiscent of the equally superior 1987 movie, Near Dark and both succeed in making their vampire protagonists deeply unsettling and disgusting. 

This is a deeply satisfying, energetic and gorgeous looking film and I goddam loved it! Definitely the best horror film I've seen in an absolute age!

One word of warning, you HAVE to stay to the end, don't get up and go as soon as the credits start or you'll miss something very important, and no, it's not a hateful dose of sequel-bating but rather a very satisfying coda to what has gone before.

9/10