Sinners and Bugonia

                                  Michael B. Jordan, twice, in “Sinners.” Warner Bros. photo via IMDb.com

When I saw “Sinners” the first time, I didn't review it.

It was because of the vampires.

What were a bunch of bloodsuckers doing in what would have otherwise been a sweeping historic epic – a brilliantly cinematic correction to the “Gone With the Wind” version of the Deep South?

When awards season started cranking up a few months ago and “Sinners” was an obvious frontrunner, I went back and watched it again.

The vampires still bugged me.

But now I knew why they had to be there.

Set in 1932, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both superbly played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown of Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta in flashy suits with wads of cash in their pockets. After fighting in World War I, they made all that money joining forces with Al Capone's bootlegging mob in Chicago. Now they want to buy an old barn and turn it into a juke joint for the folks at home.

The film reunites Jordan with his go-to writer-director Ryan Coogler, and Coogler's wife/producer Zinzi. The script nimbly, if unbelievably, crams the story into 24 hours, one morning to the next, with a postscript several decades later.

Over the day, the brothers buy the barn (from a Klan-connected seller), enlist a whole lot of folks from town to get it ready, then open for business. Business consisting of drinking, eating, and dancin' to the devil's music. Everyone's having a real good time … until those danged vampires show up.

With strong performances from Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo, Saul Williams, Andrene Ward-Hammond, Helena Hu, Yao and Jack O'Connell, “Sinners” is as sensuous (thanks to Autumn Durald's cinematography) as it is rich with historic detail. 

Day-to-day activities on Clarksdale's Main Street or scenes of cotton pickers in the fields come back to life. The way the characters talk to each other feels real and intimate, currents of sexuality never far from the surface.

The racial realities of 1932 Mississippi are never far from the surface, either. A variety of circumstances, or facts of life, curse every character in the story. The twin's cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) is among the most doomed, for the sin of playing blues guitar.

A reckoning awaits, and it fills the third act with blood and the fires of hell. Literally. 

And did I mention the vampires?

My first reaction was that they were an unnecessary distraction from what would have otherwise been a masterpiece, a best picture contender along the lines of “12 Years a Slave.” 

Well, “Sinners” certainly is a best picture contender, amidst all its other nominations, as this awards season goes into high gear with the Golden Globes Sunday, 5 p.m. Hollywood time on CBS.

But thanks to the vampires, it's something more. It's a horror movie and a smash hit at the box office.

Golden Globes and Oscars are great … for a night or two. 

Worldwide grosses of $368 million are forever.

                                             Emma Stone, Aidan Delbis and Jesse Plemons in “Bugonia.” 

Focus Features/Atsushi Nishijima photo via IMDb.com

Also up for Golden Globes for best picture, best actress and best actor is “Bugonia.”

It's in the comedy or musical category. Go figure.

A sci-fi cautionary tale, it reunites the beautiful and fearless Emma Stone with her frequent collaborator, bizarre director Yogos Lanthimos. The pair hit Oscar gold with 2023's “Poor Things,” gender bending “Frankenstein” into a young woman's twisted, delightful sexual odyssey into awareness. 

Versatile Jesse Plemons joined their little club in 2024's “Kinds of Kindness.” Now he's back for more strange games with Stone. She plays Michelle, the icy CEO of a biomedical lab on the cutting edge of genetic engineering and other sorts of life-changing experiments. He plays Teddy, an employee in the shipping department, who's convinced that Michelle is, in fact, an alien being wreaking havoc with life on earth. 

Teddy lives with his not-too-swift cousin Don (Aidan Delbis) in their family's rustic farmhouse way out in the country. Teddy is an off-the-grid beekeeper kind of guy, and an avid if slightly deranged researcher in a range of subjects from planet-saving ecology to capitalistic and/or cosmic conspiracies.

He's sort of a poor man's version of RFK Jr.

Teddy and Don seem harmless enough … right up until they follow through on the madcap scheme to kidnap Michelle and hold her captive until she changes her ways. The abduction is no easy feat considering her levels of security, not to mention her martial arts training. But its violence is a preview of things to come.

Once caught and chained to her bed, Michelle engages with her captors in an intellectual chess match where the stakes for danger keep rising. Stone and Plemons are brilliantly matched and the performances are terrific:… but that doesn't make Michelle or Teddy the kind of people you'd want to hang out with.

Who's going to win their war of wills provides the tension in this dark satire of capitalism run amok, and the consequences for the planet, and the beings who live on it. The film's title comes from an ancient Greek concept that bees could spontaneously generate from the dead carcass of a sacrificial ox. But then again, irony was an ancient Greek concept, too.

Writer-director Lanthimos doesn't have much use or patience for human stupidity, and his trademark is pushing his actors – and his audiences – well past their comfort zones, to experience their breaking points.

In “Poor Things,” the results were weird, but utterly charming.

In “Bugonia,” they're just weird.