Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan have produced some incredible work together. The biographical debut Fruitvale Station; the tragic Marvel wallop of Black Panther; and effortlessly fusing the past and future in the drama of Creed...

It’s saying something, but Sinners is easily their most successful collaboration yet.

The Smokestack twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan), slick Stack and pragmatic Smoke, return to Mississippi from Chicago in 1932. Having played the mob, they sink their funds into opening a juke joint in a local saw mill, assembling old friends, including Smoke’s estranged and spiritual wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Slack’s ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), and holding an opening night no one will forget. 

As past loves kindle and clash inside, the twins realise they might never be able to sustain the business with the money of a population who predominantly work on plantations. But their masterstroke is dragging along their cousin ‘Pastor Boy’ Sammy, who’s singing and guitar playing, it seems, can fuse space and time, history and future. 

When envious eyes feel that transcendental power, the joint comes under siege from evil forces. As it’s doubtful anyone can survive the night, was Sammie’s father right to think the Blues are supernatural?

With Sinners, Coogler conjures up an intoxicating Southern Gothic epic, sweating with incredibly realised characters, the social pressures of the time, and reverentially gory horror. But where it latches in the mind and promises to stay for some time is in the incredible score, which not only blends music from the past to the present in an unforgettable spell, but is a protagonist in its own right. 

Ludwig Göransson’s score, with powerfully woven diegetic and non-diegetic music, is vital to Sinners’ vision and plot, and so integral that it earns him an executive producer credit. This is in every sense a collaboration between two vital storytellers. Then there’s the two Jordans.

For much of the film, Jordan holds the screen, frequently interacting with himself/each other (on first appearance, sharing a cigarette). He conjures two distinct and impressive performances – the thieving mobsters, the ex-soldiers, the world-wise and world-wary – the rugged spine that runs through the whole film and is central to its observations on moral decline. 

Events enshrine Smoke as the most realised creation. He’s the solid business side of the equation, as he puts it, who can’t talk slick like his brother or do voodoo like his estranged love, Anna. If we’re being kind, he’s the too pragmatic, dapper but quietly conflicted man, bruised and battered by life. While often unlikeable, he’s explicable and compelling.

On one level, the twins represent modern ways (in the newfangled 20th-century) returning home to the Deep South, only to meet, clash and fall to old powers they’ve either forgotten or never believed in. That would be a singular crossover with this year’s high-profile reinterpretation of Nosferatu. But there are many lights of reference and storytelling shining through the picture, and something more mysterious and more universal than Bayou haints threatening the brothers’ dreams. 

The opening scene, in which a broken, scarred Sammie drives a crimson car to his father’s white panelled chapel, leads us to jump to an outcome. But things don’t unravel as we might think. To get the whole picture, make sure you stay through and beyond the initial credits, till the bitter, or shining, end.

Sinners isn’t the first film to blend genres in its second half. However, the swerve from social dynamics to action horror is more than the schlocky, stylish fun, sex, and violence of Tarantino and Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn. If there’s a complaint, it’s that once Sinners enters siege territory, the final act is so brief.

That’s not to say that it isn’t packed with character moments and tension. But a few jumps and tricks Coogler employs are a fair trade for the sumptuous first and second acts. The first third of the film establishes its largeish cast, as the twins separate to assemble their friends and sometime rivals. In the second, the history grows and the layers build, ready for its destructive climax.

When it hits, when it really kicks in, the IMAX screen deepens from the beautiful panoramic ratio, giving us the sense we’re diving into the fight for survival. It’s bravura, confident filmmaking in a movie that knows and wears its many roots. It’s not just the Southern Gothic, either; one scene masterfully twists a crucial scene from John Carpenter’s The Thing.

One scene, which everyone’s rightly talking about, sits above all others. Sammie first taking to the floor of the joint is a perfect microcosm of the film’s themes and scope. An extraordinary swirling one-er that transcends picture and music.

It’s a jaw-dropping moment of cinema, and a pivotal moment in a magnificent film.