Sinners has surpassed a lot of box office records by the time I’m writing this in June: it’s the highest grossing film in a decade not based on IP (mouthful, but it means that it’s a indie with legs, where successive weekends saw an increase in audiences, which is unusual!). The first time I saw this movie it was pretty late at night and the theater was pretty much packed. Some things that make this movie kind of a standout, besides the excellent cast performances, the musical performances, and the creepy creepy snek (the scariest thing in the movie) are all the ways the movie wriggles out of its genre to surprise. The movie is weirdly sexy? There’s a LOT of drool, enough that the movie is almost entirely the Hailee Steinfeld meme at this point. But there’s also the interaction between Stack and his estranged wife at the house. AND the bit where the vampire shows off his command of Chinese by talking about eating her out as her husband. AND the ice cream advice in the car. Look, there’s a LOT, actually, and it’s all amazing. There’s so much more I didn’t even get to and this movie covers a single fucking day.
The single day constraint to the structure of the movie is kind of daring and fun. The flash forward at the beginning followed by the tight restart twenty four hours earlier sets things in motion and then the movie really lingers on some wholesome interactions as the Smokestack Brothers return to their hometown and get the gang back together for a grand opening. There’s been a lot of discourse about the racial politics of this movie and how messy the vampire’s all-consuming colorblind union of souls seems to be, how horrific the prospect of riverdancing for the rest of your days would be, and the way you can wring humor out of making every actor eat an entire bulb of garlic for a bit, before revealing it all to be a mistake and a red herring. The Cooglers (husband and wife team) are in full command of the laugh points in the story and the final Tarantino-esque fantastical sequence at the shootout is absolutely wonderful on top of an weird and excellent climax to the night sequence a scene earlier.
NYT ran a piece earlier this year about the technology involved in doubling a character on screen, which I think is really, really fun, because it also identifies a possible theme for this year’s cinema, at least in the early part of the year, to be double-casting in films like Mickey 17 and Robert De Niro’s The Alto Nights.
