The incredible long-take that defines Ryan Coogler’s ‘Sinners’

Coogler has a few of these “one-ers” on his résumé, but they’re largely fight scenes that compress time and space, preventing us from escaping the adrenaline. In Sinners, the form this takes is a long, snaking shot that travels around the makeshift juke club as Sammie first performs for the paying audience in attendance: mostly local Black sharecroppers looking for a space of their own. It’s here that Sammie’s abilities come to the fore, albeit in a manner only visible to the audience. As he plays his tune and sings his heart out, specters from across time enter and exit the frame, dancing and playing their own instruments, from tribal drums to electric guitars which, at the time the film is set, haven’t yet been invented.

For two-and-a-half minutes, composer Ludwig Göransson matches Coogler’s visual rhythms with melodic mixtures that blend past, present and future, from primal percussions all the way through West Coast DJs mixing records in the 1980s. By refusing to cut away, the scene expands temporally outward as different points in history collide, existing impossibly in the same space and time.

Along the way, as the film’s two Chinese American characters walk through the scene—the twins’ friends, Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), who assist them on opening night—we also catch glimpses of Peking opera dancers performing the folkloric Journey to the West, based on a novel with enormous influence on modern storytelling (especially in manga and anime). The scene also features a Jimi Hendrix-type waltzing with the camera as the sound of his electric axe and Sammie’s rickety acoustic instrument cross pollinate. It’s practically a chapter on the history of modern music, distilled down to a spiritual cinematic moment—one deeply reminiscent of Steve McQueen’s pulse-pounding British West Indian romance Lovers Rock.

Michael B. Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack in "Sinners."

Warner Bros. Pictures

Sinners may as well be an entire book on the subject of artistic and political evolution, given how musically inspired its story ends up being. While the aforementioned scene is likely to be a standout, it’s part and parcel of the film at large. Like Sammie, it’s the connective tissue between what precedes it and what follows. Take, for instance, Bo and Grace’s uneasy integration with the movie’s setting. Their southern American accents speak to the long history of Chinese people in the Mississippi delta (dating back to the 19th century), and they’re very much treated like a part of the local community. However, a detail that goes unremarked upon is that the enterprising couple runs two grocery stores across the street from each other—one where non-white customers shop, and one that appears to be whites only. They are, at one, part of Clarksdale’s fabric, while existing outside its Black-white racial binary, in a way that allows them to profit economically.

That the Chinese couple is spiritually in tune with the film’s Black characters—they’re the only non-Black folks allowed in the juke joint—makes them feel like family, but they also exist in an entirely different cultural and political context. Where Sammie’s spiritual rendezvous conjures dancers and musicians with a single heritage, from the centuries-old, quick-stepping masked Zaouli dance from West Africa, to the modern Crip Walk, Bo and Grace’s artistic ancestry is limited to a single style that whizzes past the camera. Its two dancers interact with one another, but share no connections to the past and future of the various African American artforms seen—whose painful, singular lineage becomes the movie’s audio-visual language.

Coogler’s films have long reckoned with the idea of lineage and legacy—whether cultural, spiritual, colonial, or individual—dating back to his 2013 debut Fruitvale Station. Although Sinners is set in the early 20th Century, the imagery he uses is reminiscent of the 19th Century Antebellum South, from the characters’ ragged attire, to their ramshackle wooden lodgings and churches, to the endless fields of cotton in which they toil. The legacy of American slavery hasn't so much been erased by this point in time as much as it has simply mutated, as evidenced by a shot of the main characters driving past prisoners in chains, forced to work the fields. (The same can be said of today: modern prison labor is arguably rooted in slavery).