“I Want Your Songs”

A Short, Spoiler-Free Review of Sinners

When Charley Patton died, he was so poor that he was buried without a headstone. It wasn’t until 1990 that John Fogerty paid to have one put on his grave.

In Ryan Coogler’s new film Sinners one of these central metaphors is the burning desire of the powerful to steal everything from those they afflict, even the art they make to salve the wounds of that affliction in the first place. According to the record labels, Charley Patton never owned his music. He sold it for $50 a song and then the labels owned it after after that.

The diegetic use of music in Sinners blew me away. The use of genre and instrument to help define characters and the use of it as a spell and a weapon by both sides was a masterful framing device. Two folk traditions of music get set against each other in a way that, on one side, turns otherwise beautiful songs into a sign of the sinister. On the other, the music bends reality and brings people to liberated ecstacy. The contrasting styles become leitmotifs that serve to set tone and drive the plot.

Even in places where the diegetic elements of the music mixed with the soundtrack, it was effective at creating and heightening an incredible sense of tension. In one scene toward the end, a long, disembodied keening string note plays over a diegetic blues guitar at particularly tense scene. The effect was so powerful that I found myself getting adrenal and a knot started to form in my stomach.

Sinners is my favorite movie in several years and I’m going to try and see it again before it leaves theaters. Not only because of how enjoyable the film and the music are, but because there were a few plot points I didn’t totally get (I’m not a careful film watcher) that I’d like to pay closer attention to on a second viewing.

I strongly recommend this movie for anyone who has ever liked the blues or is a sucker for clever interplay of different art forms. Hell, even if you like a good horror movie, I’m sure it would hold up well even if the musical elements don’t move you as much as they did me.