Watched: 04/26/2025
Format: Drafthouse
Viewing: First
Director: Ryan Coogler
I guess Marshall is my "there's a vampire movie out, we're going" buddy. And, really, Marshall was the ideal movie buddy for this one. He's an avid music fan, a musician, and his rock sensibilities - when I met him in the early 1990's - were blues-based. He's also a fan of vampire flicks, although I don't think I've convinced him to watch the Hammer vampire flicks yet.
In addition, Marshall is well-read, and with an academic background in creative fiction, his critical analysis is always impressive. But he refused to send me a blog post for this movie so that I didn't have to write one. He is refusing me this one simple request, and so I am hoping if I butter him up enough with this high praise, next time, he'll do it.
Anyway - count me in with the people who loved Sinners (2025), and am excited about seeing it again.
This is going to be a movie that launches a thousand takes. I think we should all be ready to buckle up and be ready for the ride.
This is Ryan Coogler's first original work - something that I was surprised to learn. That WB made, promoted and gave Coogler free-reign to do what he wants (and, I am told, gave him an amazing deal) shows that sometimes studios can do good things if they just stop mucking about and "correcting" talent. It makes you wonder what happens when you ask the execs to step away from the MovieTron 3000 and let people break some rules for what works and what doesn't. Trust a bit.
This is a Black film, creatively and from the POV. But despite what I am sure the accountants thought would happen with a non-IP-driven, Black film, it's getting good notices and just completed its second week blowing away the expectations of the box office prognosticators - essentially matching its first week earnings, which is unheard of in this era.
Certainly, in bullet point form, the movie is more or less a post-Night of the Living Dead they're-out there-we're-in-here siege monster movie. I've seen this with zombies a dozen times over now, werewolves and vampires. Rather than ten minutes in a cemetery while weird reports come over the radio and then hiding out in a house for 70 minutes, the film takes its sweet time to get to the real vampire business. There's plenty of set-up, and - there was maybe a separate movie with no vampires that could have happened here.
But as a monster/ vampire movie, it mostly plays as a very good version of that. And I liked that movie.
Like Jordan Peele, Coogler is speaking to the audience about things other than the narrow framing of the horror set-up. Yes, of course the movie acknowledges racism in the Mississippi Delta in the height of the Klan as the most venal and transparent of racism in generational memory. We're past slavery and into deep Jim Crow in an era where you can't write off what's happening as "well, that was back then". The single street of town has a Black side and a White side for doing shopping, and even two men shot in the street on the Black side is no reason the White folks can't still promenade.
At the heart of the story are a handful of characters, anchored by Smoke and Stack, played both by Michael B. Jordan, doing some amazing work, well enough that maybe a few minutes in, you stop paying attention to the Hayley Mills of it all. He plays twins, returned from Chicago after seven years away - and word is they were working for Al Capone, but certainly they were up to some gangsterism. Disenchanted with city life, they've come back to the Mississippi Delta where they plan to set up a Juke Joint.
As a middle-aged White Dude from the Texas suburbs, I am not the authority on anything here. I'm going to refrain a bit from trying to contextualize some of this history as I am not an expert. But suffice to say, juke joints were Black owned clubs and a needed outlet in the American South. If I pretended to know more than what I've seen in movies like The Color Purple, I'd be out of my depth. And if I'm wrong on my read of the film, please feel free to slap me and correct me.
The twins buy an old mill from a racist old bastard, and set up their club, recruiting their cousin, Sammie - a musician of great talent despite his youth - he's just now old enough to drink and move from girls to women.
At least the first half of the movie is Sammie, Smoke and Stack reconnecting with known people, recruiting them for work in the juke joint, and maybe planning out their future. Smoke, we learn, left the Delta after the passing of his infant son - leaving behind his mourning partner, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku). Stack is shocked to reconnect with Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) who has passed for white and left the Delta - but happens to be back for her mother's funeral.
Anyway - It's rich, complex and could have been a whole movie just about that. I'd have been happy. Michael B. Jordan is great, but so is *everyone*. Delroy Lindo, Li Jun Li, Omar Benson Miller. Everyone is dialed in.
As I put it elsewhere, I was maybe 2/3rd of the way through the movie and started clicking to some of what was happening, and realized I probably needed to rewatch the movie at some point soon. I'd missed what the movie was saying to this point, or maybe that was when it really kicked into gear.
The movie pitches vampirism in much the same way we're used to it. They hate garlic, they need to be invited in, they need to stay out of the sun. But they also share a communal hive-mind. They share memories and thoughts. And it can't have been a coincidence that the first vampire in the film is Irish - ie: a people with a history of being oppressed going back as far as Irish history goes (and, by the way, just for fun, Bram Stoker was Irish).
What the vampires pitch isn't actually that bad. Eternal life. And togetherness with your pack of vampires - your new identity that of being a vampire, your differences stripped away - along with your individuality. I mean, yeah, you're a blood sucking monster, but you're *changing* people, not really killing them.
Watching a scene in which the recently turned former juke joint customers were now out dancing and singing an Irish song and wheeling in an Irish dance, I think I started clicking to maybe what Coogler was offering up. The offer of the vampires is the offer of well-meaning white folks to join a melting pot, where individuality and culture and memory is considered a good, but at the cost of loss of the self and one's individuality and history. The vampires promise fellowship and love, but at the cost of your personal death.
The alternative, of course, is that the Twins have purchased the mill from a racist old bastard, and they learn he was always planning to take the money from the Twins and then come back and kill them with his Klan pals. Ie: the often historical reality of being Black in America if you try to advance
That the Native Americans are ready to hunt and put down the vampire at the opening seems deeply on point. They know about bad-faith offers and broken deals.
There's also, by the way, an acknowledgement of the unique role of Chinese-Americans in the South - neither Black nor White, but able to work alongside anyone as a minority who people may not have settled opinions.
There's an incredible set-piece in the film - we're told up front that if a musician is skilled enough, their music can bring the past, present and future together. And it sounds corny as hell, and I was braced for some Crossroads nonsense. Instead, we both get an astonishing sequence in which Sammie/ Preacher Boy plays, crossing timeline in spirit if not reality- bringing together traditions and pointing the way forward - the Mississippi Blues leading us to the future. It is some deep musicologist spin. But it's also worth noting that our promise of a melting pot of lost identity is drawn to this - like white kids with dreads to a P Funk show. And they want to play along with their own ukuleles.
It's kinda brutal.
Anyway - some of this I was cooking up myself as I watched the movie, and I knew I'd be dissecting it for this discussion and put the pieces together. I could be wrong! That's the risk of getting into subtext when you're out of your depth. A good chunk of what's above was inspired by my post-movie convo with Marshall. I agreed with what he was saying as I was starting to tease out the meaning of the vampirism's hive-mind-ness and the lapsing into Irish music, dance and accents. So, kudos to him for getting there first.
There's a lot more to the movie, but I figure I need another viewing or two to dig deeper into what Coogler's on about (if you read it as just a horror movie in which vampires happen, I will nod politely and then say "anyway..." and keep talking about the subtext).
I haven't sorted it all out, and could be wrong. I haven't decided why Coogler wanted Smoke and Stack to be not just brothers, but twins. I have ideas about why Mary is a white-passing woman and why she's our first victim from our leads. And why Annie does what she does and why that story arc winds up as it does. But I'll let others weigh in.
This is not going to be my final viewing or probably final write-up of the movie. There's plenty to dig into. I like a movie where the subtext is the text, and felt like at the end of the movie like I'd just walked into a restaurant expecting a good meal and was shocked with what hit the table, and the overall dining experience.
Maybe I've been watching too many terrible movies lately that a good one feels like a miracle. That's certainly possible. But I do think when I revisit the movie, it will be an even richer experience.
Now, if I can figure out how and why Hailee Steinfeld in the movie's coda looks shockingly like Debi Mazar in 1992, I'll have really unpacked this movie.
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