Sinners ★★★1/2
- 2filmcritics
- Apr 27
- 5 min read
Availability: Showing widely in theaters nationally and internationally. Streaming expected on Max in late July or early August, based on past Warner productions. See JustWatch here for updated streaming and purchase options.
Put Down that Guitar!
“Sinners” is director, writer, and producer Ryan Coogler’s first venture into the now-mainstream genre of horror, and he’s not just dipping a toe in those waters. There’s plenty of blood and guts to go around, brought to you by a cadre of half-dead vampires hungry for nourishment and eager to offer a version of the good “life” to their victims.
Smoke and Stack might be (flawed) heroes or (empathetic) villains. We’ll see.
The film opens in 1932 in the ordinary small town of Clarksdale, Mississippi, where folklore has it that legendary Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his other-worldly talent as a blues guitarist and singer. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Coogler’s actor-muse, Michael B. Jordan) have just returned to their hometown from gangland Chicago, flashing a roll of bills and primed to open a juke joint in a nearby abandoned sawmill owned by a KKK Grand Dragon. Clarksdale has the look of a Kansas cow town in the 1870s—though it’s the Jim Crow South and the population is mostly Black—and Smoke and Stack might be (flawed) heroes or (empathetic) villains. We’ll see.
The doorway to the juke joint is a critical boundary. Twins Stack and Smoke, left and center, both played by Michael B. Jordan, and bouncer Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) try to figure out what's outside.
In scenes that could be out of “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), the twins proceed—a bit too slowly—to recruit those they’ll need to hold a grand opening of their juke joint, that night. Among them are cotton picker Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller, doorman and bouncer); Smoke’s estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku, the cook), a practitioner of mild voodoo; fellow outsiders and Chinese shopkeepers Grace and Bo (Li Jun Li and Yao, suppliers of catfish for 100); and the all-important musicians: Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo, on piano and harmonica), singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson), and the son of a preacher man, young Sammie (Miles Caton), a gifted guitar player (perhaps evoking the Robert Johnson story) whose transcendent music will be a force for good—and evil, as his father says in demanding he put down his guitar. Of those invited to the party, only Mary (Hailee Steinfeld, playing Stack’s resentful ex-girlfriend) is white—or could pass for it; she has a half-black grandfather.
Sammie (Miles Caton) is a
gifted guitar player, whose music draws everyone in and begins the ecstatic evening.
As one Black character says, “white people like Black music; they just don’t like the people who make it.”
As in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out!”, Coogler’s white people are invariably evil and untrustworthy, though they may present themselves as amiable and even beguiling. Led by sweet-talking Remmick (Jack O’Connell), they are represented here by two men and a woman who offer music of their own—pleasant, lilting, danceable, even mesmerizing Irish folk melodies. White music. It lacks the power, the sensuality, and the emotional weight of the Black music, accompanied by ecstatic dancing, coming from the juke joint. And perhaps, as they try to talk their way into the dance (while giving off that vampire vibe), they know it, resent it, and wish to remake “race” music as their own—as Presley and Jagger and many others did. As one Black character says, “white people like Black music; they just don’t like the people who make it.”
Mary (Hailee Steinfield, seated), whose grandfather was half-black, is attracted to the fantasy and music of the white folks. Irish Remmick (Jack O'Connell, seated next to her) is a sweettalker.
If Coogler’s white people are nefarious, his portrait of Black people is of naïve souls; naïveté may be a requirement of the horror narrative.
Some of the film’s most dramatic scenes take place at the doorway of the juke joint, with the Blacks inside and the whites, by then reasonably identifiable as zombie-like vampires, unable (by vampire convention, or filmmaker decision) to enter the building without an explicit invitation. One would think that the partygoers would be united and firm in drawing the line, shutting the door, and saving their lives. But no. For reasons that have much to do with white/Black relations over the centuries, and especially with—as Coogler relates it—latent Black desires for acceptance by whites and (even) racial integration, Black people can’t help but be tempted by the nice, gracious, polite white people who promise them friendship, community, music that cuts across racial boundaries, and life, finally, as insiders. If Coogler’s white people are nefarious, his portrait of Black people is of naïve souls; naïveté may be a requirement of the horror narrative.
Coogler’s venture into over-the-top, fantastical violence involving Blacks and vampires allows him to somewhat distance the story from the sordid realities of color and race and, instead, present the tale as a parable.
The violence that ensues—and, indeed, the whole vampire plotline—will strike some as an unfortunate, supernatural, and messy departure from a more germane social reality, a concession to the current fascination with horror (appealing to the young and usually—but not this time—cheap to make) that’s overtaken Hollywood in the last decade. Looking more closely, it seems to us that Coogler’s venture into over-the-top, fantastical violence involving Blacks and vampires allows him to somewhat distance the story from the sordid realities of color and race and, instead, present the tale as a parable. The blood-sucking vampires crave a taste of what the Blacks have: an undeniably more inspirational culture.
They finally take on the vampires, led by Smoke (Michael B. Jordan, center).
From left, Sammie (Caton), Pearline (Jayme Lawson), Annie (Wunmi Mosaku),
Stack (again, Jordan), and Grace Chow (Li Jun Li).
That distancing strategy has been employed before, most recently in “Emilia Pérez” (2024), with musical theater insulating the viewer from Mexican cartel atrocities, and most notably in director George A. Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead” (1968), which used the figure of the zombie to represent the half-dead concentration camp prisoner known as the Musselmann and, more broadly, the horrors of the Holocaust. As if to acknowledge that casting vampires as the enemy skirts the real issue, Coogler offers a discrete scene (it seems to come out of nowhere) in which Smoke machine-guns down a Ku Klux Klan mob bent on killing everyone in the juke joint.
Coogler may be a theorist at heart, but he’s no slouch as a storyteller. Two scenes, separated by a portion of the credits (don’t leave when they start to roll!), take Sammie (now Buddy Guy) into 1992, playing with a band in a Chicago jazz club, and sharing with ageless vampires Mary and Stack the sense that the day the juke joint opened was (until the sun went down) the best day of their lives—a touching reminder of what could have been.
“Sinners” is packed with couples we care about—Stack and Mary, Smoke and Annie, Sammie and Pearline, Bo and Grace—and it features a rich Ludwig Göransson score “so pure,” as one character in the film describes music at its most compelling, “it can pierce the veil between life and death, past and future.” Although we wish it were somewhat easier to distinguish Smoke from Stack, there’s no doubt that Michael B. Jordan is a riveting screen presence—and that Ryan Coogler has made a riveting film. Maybe the horror works, after all.
He says: When reality hurts too much, cue the vampires.
She says: “There’s a lot to unpack here,” one of our fellow filmgoers said. And there is. We’ve left a lot of Coogler’s vision (this is his first original screenplay) to enjoy—unmediated by our review.
Date: 2025
Director: Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell, Delroy Lindo, Jayme Lawson, Hailee Steinfeld, Omar Benson Miller, Wunmi Mosaku, Buddy Guy, Yao, Li Jun Li
Runtime: 137 minutes
Country: United States
Language: English
Other Awards: None to date
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