Sinners

If you’re a filmgoer like me, chances are Wunmi Mosaku is a performer whose work you probably weren’t too familiar with before Sinners. According to Wikipedia the British-Nigerian actress had previously been most well-known for her work on television, and apparently for some Marvel shows and movies I never watched. Leave it to my man Ryan Coogler, one of the few artists to come out of the world of Marvel with his artistic credibility unscathed, to give this powerhouse talent the showcase she deserves in his Deep South-set, blaxploitation, vampire action horror, musical opus.

As Sinners begins with her voiceover narration over a haunting title sequence, Mosaku’s spirit runs deep through the film despite her being only one part of a much larger ensemble. As the strong and soulful Annie—the estranged wife of protagonist Smoke and a hoodoo witch respected and revered by the local townsfolk—Mosaku gives a towering supporting performance making every second of her screen time count. Much like Benicio del Toro’s Sensei in One Battle After Another, Wunmi Mosaku’s Annie is the moral center of Sinners. With a will as strong as her intuition and the heart of a healer, Mosaku embody’s the film’s themes of spirituality. And, also like del Toro’s character, she serves as something of a guide into this world’s closed-off subculture and its tightly knit inhabitants.

In a film with three romantic subplots, it is Annie’s relationship with Michael B. Jordan’s Smoke (or Elijah as she calls him by his birth name) that feels the most fully developed, tender, and believable. It takes a special kind of talent to make Michael B. Jordan seem to recede into the background when acting alongside him, but Mosaku’s presence is so powerful that it’s easy to see how even a man as tough and hardened as Smoke would end up simping for her. As beautiful as Mrs. Josh Allen herself, Hailee Steinfeld, is in Sinners, and as sexy as some of her scenes are, Wunmi Mosaku’s brief love scene with Jordan is every bit as erotically charged and passionate … and without her having to spit in his mouth. (But hey I’m not here to kink shame.)

Since the character of Annie is an expert on witchcraft and the supernatural, Mosaku also has the difficult task of conveying the various aspects of Sinner’s mythology and lore when the vampires finally show up in its later segments. In lesser hands, such moments could have come off as clunky exposition dumps. Mosaku conversely manages to imbue them with the appropriate gravitas, urgency, and mysticism needed. And, in one of the film’s most touching scenes near the end, when Smoke manages to see through the veil and glimpse her spirit nursing their baby in the afterlife, the core themes of Sinners dealing with how the shared communal bonds of love transcend time and space, are brought into clear focus.