Movie Reviews: Ash & Sinners
Sinners
How, exactly, does a filmmaker go about making a genuinely original vampire movie these days? Audiences memorized the rule book decades ago: holy water, garlic, sunlight, stakes through the heart, yada yada yada. With his latest picture Sinners, writer and director Ryan Coogler has hit upon an ingenious solution: don’t make a vampire movie. Instead, the director who brought authenticity to Marvel’s Black Panther movies has delivered a genre-defying, near-unclassifiable fantasia — not a horror movie, nor a period drama, nor a musical, nor a meditation on cultural appropriation, but something that is all of the above (and quite a lot of other things too).
The year is 1932, and the setting is Clarksdale, Mississippi, deep in the heart of the Jim Crow South. Young blues prodigy Sammie has his heart set on achieving musical success. Defying his father in the clergy, he sets off with his Dobro guitar to team up with his cousins, the identical twins Smoke and Stack (both played by longtime Coogler collaborator Michael B. Jordan), who have relinquished their lives working for the Chicago mob and returned home to set up a juke joint for the local community. After buying a disused sawmill from a racist landowner, Sammie and the twins set off on a road trip to recruit performers and staff, tapping Smoke’s estranged wife and Hoodoo priestess Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) as cook, and alcoholic piano player Delta Slim (a spectacularly oily and taciturn Delroy Lindo) as the resident entertainment. The opening night begins as a resounding success, with Sammie’s transcendent music summoning spirits of both the past and the future in a rapturous crowd transported by the energy. Unfortunately, that energy summons something darker: charming Irish vampire Rennick and his newly-converted Ku Klux Klan companions.
It’s difficult to know where to start with this jaw-dropping display of film-making fireworks, but the first thing that needs to be said is how beautifully crafted it is. Coogler gives us a masterclass in pacing. Shot on Ultra Panavision 70mm and IMAX film (formats usually reserved for billion-dollar epics), the first hour of the movie stews the viewer slowly in the baking Mississippi heat, establishing such a perfect sense of place that you can almost feel the sweat running down your back. Such is Coogler’s skill at immersion that the moment when the film shifts gears into the blood-drenched final act is genuinely shocking, roaring towards the climax at such a breakneck speed that all one can do is grip the arm-rests and cling on for dear life.
There are far, far too many thematic layers in Sinners to discuss in depth in a review of this length. It draws heavily from African-American history and the mythos of the Jim Crow South, particularly the legend of bluesman Robert Johnson and his fateful encounter with the Devil at a certain crossroads. It’s also about the collision of the African-American and Scots-Irish Celtic shamanistic cultures, both forced from their native lands by colonizing invaders and oppressed by poverty and bigotry. It’s also about the primal power of music as a unifying force. It’s also just a bloody good vampire movie. See it on the biggest screen you can find. Then see it again.
Ash
The terrifying moment in world history we find ourselves living through forces us to reevaluate many of the things we took for granted, including what we seek out to keep ourselves entertained. There’s a strong case to be made for disappearing into pure escapism, immersing ourselves in the fantasy worlds of video games or TV shows to block out the horrors bombarding our senses in the real world. This may go some way to explaining the recent resurgence of interest in the horror movie genre. Perhaps a brief escape into someone else’s terror gives us respite from our own.
Serving up a fresh slab of low-budget sci-fi horror is record producer, DJ, rapper, and now filmmaker Flying Lotus with his debut feature film, Ash. In deep space, a small crew of human explorers attempt to colonize the newly-discovered planetoid nicknamed ‘Ash’ in the name of a human race trying desperately to escape a dying Earth. Crew member Riya (Eiza González) awakens to a corpse-littered scene of carnage, with no memory of who or where she is, nor does she have any idea what caused the bloody devastation around her. Lotus makes her disorientation and confusion the central theme of the movie. A series of jump-scare flashbacks casts ever more doubt on Riya’s role in the disaster, and illustrates her own increasing doubt in her unreliable memory. The arrival of another crew member, Brion (Aaron Paul), who claims to have received a distress signal she sent, only adds to the confusion; but the interaction between the two yields some not-so-subtle clues into what’s really going on. By the time the film gets to the ‘big reveal’ and shifts the horror action into top gear, it’s safe to say that the majority of the audience will already have figured it out — but that doesn’t detract from the bloody, high-octane festival of body horror that closes the movie in an entirely predictable but satisfyingly gory fashion.
It’s obvious from the get-go that Flying Lotus isn’t trying to win any awards for originality. Ash is a simmering gumbo of virtually every space-bound horror movie and video game in recent memory. There’s a hefty slice of the Alien franchise in González’s sub-Ripley lead character and the regular crew flashbacks, while the grisly alien nasties owe much to recent video games Dead Space and The Callisto Protocol. The slow-baked suspense of the first act feels very like Paul Anderson’s Event Horizon, and the closing denouement might as well be an homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing.
That said, the film manages to plow its own creative furrow with an ingenious use of lighting and photography. Riya’s amnesiac journey through the ruined starbase is lit in flashes of psychedelic greens and purples, cutting jarringly through the suffocating crushed blacks that Lotus cloaks the entire film in. Adding this ‘very, very bad acid trip’ layer to the disorientation of Riya’s fractured consciousness is a masterstroke on Lotus’ part, making the most of an extremely limited budget. There are a couple of moments towards the end of the final act where the film teeters right on the brink of being laugh-out-loud silly, but Lotus has a tight enough grasp on the pacing to ratchet up the horror at just the right moments. Ultimately, Ash offers nothing that sci-fi horror fans haven’t seen before, but if a rich stew of gory terror is what you’re looking for, grab a spoon and dig in.
Recently arrived in the Tri-Cities, Damian is a former freelancer who previously wrote movie and music reviews for a variety of UK websites.