‘Sinners’ Review: Ryan Coogler’s Brilliantly Staged, Subtext-Rich Vampire Movie
Set in 1930s Mississippi, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners pulls liberally from the folklore surrounding that period’s explosion of blues talent in the Delta area. Musicians of the time, crushed by the weight of Jim Crow and the Great Depression, generally plied their wares in juke joints, and the film centers on one such establishment newly acquired by identical twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan), dubbed the Smokestack Twins.
The brothers fled the South as soon as they could, making their way as soldiers in the European trenches and enforcers for the Chicago mob. Now they’ve returned to Clarksdale with a lot of ill-gotten gain and even more cynicism about their travels, having found only more discrimination in ostensibly more progressive places. In coming home, they’ve chosen the devil they know.
Gathering supplies for their opening night, Smoke and Stack also source talent for their establishment from those living in the area. Chief among them is gravelly old bluesman, Detroit Slim (Delroy Lindo), to their own cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), a son of a preacher man whose preternatural guitar skills and wise-before-his-time croon invite comparisons to Delta legend Robert Johnson, who legend has it made a deal with the devil for his talent.
As Sammie and the twins gear up for a night of dancing and drinking, a man named Remmick (Jack O’Connell) shows up at the doorstep of a white couple, smoking and blistered and begging for shelter, only for the setting sun to reveal an inhuman glow in his eyes and lengthening fangs in his mouth. Eventually, as the twins’ opening night bash heats up at their juke joint, Remmick and his newly turned victims show up requesting to be let inside.
Remarkably, Sinners delays the reveal of its genre bona fides for nearly its entire first half, devoting time to establishing the quotidian horrors of Jim Crow Mississippi. Paired once again with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Coogler crafts impressive visuals that communicate the depth of history to racial strife.
Fields of cotton stretch to the vanishing point, their idyllic beauty undermined by the pointed reminder of how little changed for a century after the Civil War in terms of slaves becoming underpaid sharecroppers picking the same fields for poverty wages. In the early Clarksdale scenes, the use of soft focus calls further attention to how Black residents are kept separated from their surroundings even in their own hometowns, outliers in a faceless white power structure that can snap into clarity at any time to rob them of their rights and lives.
Sinners also takes its time building its characters. Sammie, a young man at a crossroads in life, would seem the obvious choice for a protagonist, but the focus of the film locks on to Smoke and Stack as their reintegration back home dredges up old memories of what they left behind. This chiefly includes old lovers: For Stack, it’s Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), the mother of their child who died in infancy, and for Smoke, it’s Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a biracial lifelong friend whose ability to pass for white prompted him to break things off between them for her safety.
The twins’ icy facades melt in intimate moments with these women that reopen old wounds but also offer tantalizing hopes of rekindling old flames. And the men’s vulnerability hints at how much of their viciousness is a forged defense mechanism against a world that forecloses happiness for them. The film works on such a profound level of feeling. A longing arises that informs a number of sex scenes and even some of the revelry at the juke joint, grounding the usual erotic language of vampire cinema in something more tender than purely consumptive.
When the carnage begins, there’s no shortage of bloodletting, but Coogler often adopts a strategy redolent of Tobe Hooper’s in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre by cutting away from a telegraphed moment of violence, leaving us with the impression of actually having seen teeth sink into a person’s throat. Later, Coogler employs the same immersive long-take magic he brought to bear in Creed’s fight sequences, and in everything from scenes depicting the skirmishes between the living as vampires grow in number to musicians striking up a tune.
Indeed, the film’s most bravura moment doesn’t even hinge on vampire carnage. Instead, it’s a spotlight on music, which Samuel plays with such heart that be begins to commune with the history of Black music, past, present, and future. As he sinks into a twanging groove, the dance floor fills with griots, tribal dancers, acid-funk electric guitarists, turntablists, and more. The camera glides around, as unstuck in any spot as the moment is in time, and for one blissful moment, the weight of the outside world fades away and leaves only a sense of artistic expression as the one true freedom in Black people’s lives. In the midst of an earthy, grimy horror movie, the scene is one of the most jubilant showstoppers in recent American cinema.
This transcendent show of solidarity ultimately becomes the subject of a fascinating contrast with the vampires who descend upon the juke joint. The images of voracious white predation are potent, but Coogler pushes past this obvious metaphor for something more provocative as Remmick slowly turns his growing mass of thralls into a musical troupe of his own, a swirling, multiracial group perversely singing Irish jigs in a unified voice. The undead repeatedly entreat the still-living characters to join them in a united family that welcomes all colors and creeds. Not unlike the Hands Across America parody of Jordan Peele’s Us, an image of harmony becomes a sick reminder of the illusion of “post-racial” life in a nation founded on ethnic hierarchy.
And yet, in offering the characters “freedom” from a world that will never accept them no matter how much money or muscle they acquire, Remmick in truth is only providing a hive mind that flattens everyone’s individual and cultural identities under his authority. It’s assimilation as a form of annihilation every bit as complete as the physical destruction of the vampires’ carnage.
As Detroit Slim tells Sammie early in Sinners, “white folks like the blues just fine, they just don’t like the people who make it.” Remmick, an Irish immigrant once brutalized by America’s racial caste system, is an oppressor and a culture vulture, lusting after the opportunity to fold the Delta blues into his own musical expression the same way that blues became a commercial property upon being seized upon by white American and British youth in the ’50s and ’60s.
That’s complex subtext, one of several that the film offers in an ingenious effort to avoid any one reading of the material. Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films of the modern era, but it nonetheless leaves an audience with the tacit reminder of the limits of art to set one free in a system that profits as much off its exploitation as that of manual labor.
Score: 3.5 STARS
Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Miller, Li Jun Li, Delroy Lindo, Peter Dreimanis, Lola Kirke, Buddy Guy, Nathaniel Arcand, Saul Williams, Yao, Helena Hu, David Maldonado Director: Ryan Coogler Screenwriter: Ryan Coogler Distributor: Warner Bros. Running Time: 137 min Rating: R Year: 2025
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Jake Cole is an Atlanta-based film critic whose work has appeared in MTV News and Little White Lies. He is a member of the Atlanta Film Critics Circle and the Online Film Critics Society.