Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Sinners is much more than a grisly vampire movie

Early morning in Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1932: bloodied, scarred and clutching the broken fretboard of a guitar, Sammie (Miles Caton) stumbles into his father’s church, traumatised by unknown horrors.

Cut to the day before, and dapper twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan) are buying an old sawmill, which they plan to open that very night as a juke joint. Having fought in world war one and then worked for Al Capone in Chicago, the brothers have come home to the Delta to start up their own enterprise.

From its earliest scenes, the sheer urgency of their plan ignites Ryan Coogler’s terrific movie. They recruit Sammie to play the guitar that they gave him (Smoke tells him that it once belonged to real-life blues legend Charley Patton); harmonica and piano blues musician, Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo); sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Miller) to be their bouncer; and Chinese American grocer Bo Chow (Yao) and his wife Grace (Li Jun Li) to handle the bar. 

Amidst all this frenetic preparation, Stack is reunited with his former lover Mary (Hailee Steinfeld); as is Smoke with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a cook and Hoodoo priestess, who runs a small store where their baby son is buried under a tree. Meanwhile, Sammie is enchanted at a railway station by Pearline (Jayme Lawson), lovelessly married and longing to sing the blues.

I don’t want to give away too much, but the scenes of the joint’s first hours are dazzling. Past, present and future melt into a tableau of kinetic magic realism, both spiritual and erotic in character. Music is framed as simultaneously emancipating and dangerous: the sonic border between the realms of light and darkness. Shot on both 65mm IMAX and Ultra Panavision 70 by Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Sinners aspires at these moments to cinematic greatness.

After which, the arrival of a mob of vampires led by the splendidly sinister Irishman Remmick (Jack O’Connell) is less jarring than you might imagine. We are already in the borderlands between the real and the supernatural – and what this tribe of the red-eyed undead offers is a bogus form of eternal liberty, sharply contrasted with the authentic freedom that has already been achieved by the juke joint revellers.

There are nods to HP Lovecraft, Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and (in a funny garlic-eating scene) John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). But, as ever, Coogler turns genre into something new and exciting. Sinners is much more than a grisly vampire movie, or another slice of American Gothic.

At its heart is the megawatt screen charisma of Jordan, with whom the director has now collaborated in all five of his feature films, and a deep appreciation of the blues, rooted in, but not confined to, the myth of Robert Johnson’s legendary deal with the devil at a crossroads. On which note: do stick around for the post-credit scenes which, in this instance, really do have something to add to a masterly, audacious and hugely entertaining film.

MUSIC

A Complicated Woman by Self Esteem
(UK tour until October 18, new album April 25)

The great Rebecca Lucy Taylor is back – and not a moment too soon. I was lucky enough to see the first public performance of her new album at the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End on April 16; and quite an experience it was, too.

Four years have passed since Taylor’s break-out album Prioritise Pleasure, nominated for Mercury and Brit awards, catapulted her into the pop stratosphere both as songwriter and performer. Since then, she has signed to a major label (Polydor) and, between September 2023 and March last year, was an outstanding Sally Bowles in Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club.

A Complicated Woman is even better than its predecessor, 12 tracks of perfect pop that deliver dancefloor magic, ferocity and vulnerability in equal measure and an unquenchable sense of wit and fun. Her message can be serious; but she doesn’t take herself seriously (witness her appearances on Richard Osman’s House of Games and The Great Celebrity British Bake Off). Which, of course, adds to the power of her art and the generous hand it stretches out to the audience.

Show opener I Do and I Don’t Care sets us up with a sharp line on glib diagnosis (“‘Be very careful what you wish for,’ she said to me, looking all smug, like she was the first person to say that”), while the club beat of Mother drives a fierce takedown of needy men (“I am not your mother, I am not your mum”). 69 is a laugh-out-loud musical audit of sexual positions, delivered deadpan. The Curse is a straight-up-no-chaser song about booze. Cheers to Me feels like a hit-in-waiting, complete with a TikTok dance and inflatable men rising on stage.

Taylor and her troupe of ten fellow performers arrive dressed in religious garb, reminiscent of The Handmaid’s Tale or a Vermeer painting. The staging, by Tom Scutt, enables them to shapeshift as the album’s themes develop.
Though Taylor is the star – and how – this is truly an ensemble show, rippling with camaraderie and jokes (check out the conga to Shirley Bassey’s This is My Life). Her message to her devoted fans is that they are “OK” – which is to say, they are fine, and certainly not as rubbish as social media and many other forces in contemporary culture conspire to make them feel.

By the time she sings I Do This All the Time (the instant classic from her last album), she has the entire theatre on its feet and singing along. Who knows what Self Esteem will do next? But, for now, she is the unrivalled pop laureate of these troubled times.

FILM

Warfare
(Selected cinemas)

Writer-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza permit themselves one trope, and one trope alone: Warfare opens with a testosterone-charged gang of Navy SEALs whooping and gyrating as they watch the famously cheesy 2004 video of Eric Prydz’s Call on Me, in which a group of scantily clad girls dances suggestively in an exercise class. The point: these soldiers are boys, barely out of adolescence.

But for the remainder of the stunning 95-minute film, Garland and Mendoza (a former SEAL himself) forswear all the traditional plot beats, expositional devices and narrative arcs of the war movie genre. Warfare confines itself rigorously to a single real-life incident on November 19, 2006: SEAL team Alpha One is supporting marines in Ramadi, capital of Iraq’s Anbar Province, on the hunt for Islamist insurgents. They break into an apartment building, hold a family at gunpoint, and establish a surveillance post to monitor suspected Al-Qaeda activity on the other side of the street (“peering with serious intent to probe”).

There is no character development, no musical soundtrack, nothing: just the sniper’s deep breathing, dogs barking, the crackle of comms with the SEALs’ support units. Only when a grenade is tossed through a window does the action begin, soon to be followed by an IED exploding under a Bradley armoured vehicle.

What follows is nerve-shredding precisely because it lacks form, tidiness and resolution. The ensemble of rising stars is excellent: Charles Melton, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Cosmo Jarvis, Noah Centineo, Will Poulter and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (who plays Mendoza). All are familiar faces, yet merge into a single adrenaline-soaked organism, covered in blood and dust, peering through smoke as the operation goes south. The screaming of the wounded does not stop, a harrowingly honest depiction of war’s reality. 

The sniper Elliott (Jarvis) is in especially rough shape and his comrades try to focus on getting him out. At the same time, they face the more mundane problem that plenty of their kit is still in another room – necessitating a messy series of dashes back to retrieve it. In its uncompromising commitment to realism, the movie bears comparison with Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece The Battle of Algiers.

Mendoza worked as a military adviser on Garland’s Civil War (2024); but this is a very different kind of film. Warfare is as much about the fugitive character of memory, especially when horror is involved, as it is about the nature of conflict. 

The real-life Elliott, to whom the movie is dedicated, cannot remember the mayhem at all. In his initial research, Mendoza went back to his fellow SEALs to piece together what they and he recalled into the basis for a movie. He has expressed frustration with civilians who say that the film is “authentic”. How would they know?

The silliest criticism of the movie has been that it lacks geopolitical “context”. The whole point of Warfare is that, in battle, there is no bandwidth for anything other than fight-or-flight instinct and the mortal peril of the here and now. Ukrainian soldiers on the front line have no time to fret about Volodymyr Zelensky’s dressing down in the Oval Office, any more than these men had the luxury of musing on UN resolutions, weapons of mass destruction and the need for a “surge” to end the Iraq conflict. 

The moment is all that counts. And the blunt force trauma of this movie is much more eloquent than a hundred stilted monologues.

STREAMING

The Thinking Game
(Curzon Home Cinema)

It is a serious creative challenge to turn the complex subject of artificial intelligence into an absorbing documentary but one to which director Greg Kohs proves more than equal in this profile of the entrepreneur and Nobel Prize winner, Demis Hassabis, and his mission at DeepMind (now Google DeepMind).

A world-ranked chess prodigy in his youth, Hassabis had designed a hit video game even before going to Cambridge, where he developed his obsessive interest in computational neuroscience. Co-founded by Shane Legg and Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind sought to create artificial general intelligence: as distinct from the specific intelligence of the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue that had defeated the then world chess champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997.

The Chinese game of Go was believed to “incomputable”, but Hassabis and his team proved otherwise, creating the program AlphaGo that defeated Korean master Lee Sedol in 2016 and then the Chinese world number one Ke Jie the following year (the Chinese government was so appalled that it cut off the news feed).

The documentary follows the company’s exploration, in its AlphaFold project, of the scientific holy grail of “protein folding”, the key to understanding the structure of proteins and therefore to treating many diseases. But its greatest strength is its focus upon the core humanity at the heart of DeepMind’s work: epitomised by the distaste of Hassabis for the butch “move fast and break things” tech mantra and his resistance to comparisons of his work to J Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project (“they did not think carefully enough about the morals of what they were doing early enough”).

To hear more about Hassabis and his rivalry with Sam Altman’s OpenAI, check out the episode of The Two Matts posted on February 10, in which Bloomberg’s Parmy Olson discusses her book Supremacy.

BOOK

Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right by Quinn Slobodian
(Allen Lane)

Though its title puts one in mind of an anarcho-punk band playing in a student bar, Quinn Slobodian’s new book is, in fact, a highly topical and brilliantly argued demolition of a misplaced orthodoxy about the surging populist right.

Digging deep into the history of ideas, he takes aim at the “stubborn story that explains so-called right wing populism as a grassroots rejection of neoliberalism”. This has been one of Donald Trump’s justifications for his deranged tariff strategy: that it will correct the inequities of globalisation and restore America’s manufacturing greatness. 

Steve Bannon, the US president’s former chief strategist and now a free-wheeling MAGA guru, has long presented himself as an “economic nationalist”, a crusader for the American working class against the so-called “globalists”. In this country, Nigel Farage has been calling for the full nationalisation of British Steel.

What Slobodian shows is that all this involves a profoundly dishonest sleight of hand. Today’s populist right remains deeply wedded to the neoliberalism of the past, and the ideas of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992), but – in what the author characterises as “new fusionism” – has added into the mix an often sinister preoccupation with borders, race, eugenics and evolutionary psychology.

Hence, Elon Musk and his fellow tech tycoon Peter Thiel have retained their belief in the unfettered pursuit of wealth and the destruction of state bureaucracy – but also embraced a reactionary position on cultural homogeneity, authoritarianism, and nationhood. To put it crudely: the freedoms they champion will not be evenly distributed. An important, perfectly timed book.