Sinners Review
By: Ralph Leonard
It isn’t easy to make the vampires-as metaphor fresh and interesting, a genre that has been exhausted in both film and television. And yet, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners somehow manages to pull it off. It’s been promoted as “genre bending”. Perhaps genre blending, or even genre fluid, is a more apt description for this post-modern piece of work. It’s part period piece, part vampire horror film, part magical realism meets Gothic spiritual, part social commentary on race in America and – at its most electrifying – somewhat a musical all in one.
Sinners is set over the course of a day and night in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, where black sharecroppers still work the cotton fields of the former plantations nearly 60 years after the abolition of slavery. Jim Crow apartheid bears down upon this black community as an oppressive weight from above, Ku Klux Klan members lurk in the background waiting for an opportunity to inflict terror upon them.
Michael B. Jordan plays with gusto, Elijah and Elias Moore, or Smoke and Stack, bootlegging brothers and former soldiers who left their hometown long ago to fight in World War I before settling in Chicago to earn their scratch. Smoke sports a blue British flat cap; Stack wears a red-brimmed hat and has two of his teeth outlined in gold. (Though we are just a third of the way into the year, this is the third film released in 2025 featuring an actor playing twin brothers – first Theo James in The Monkey, and, more recently, Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17 (though the Mickey were more clones than twins exactly).
Both brothers return home with rolls of cash and cases of illegal Irish beer with the ambition to open a juke joint in a disused sawmill bought off a racist, Ku Klux Klan sympathising white man, and they hope their little cousin Sammie (Miles Caton, a former backup singer for H.E.R.), nicknamed Preacher boy, a sharecropper who is also precociously gifted blues singer and guitarist that yearns for nothing more than to play music, will help them out.
The basic premise of Sinners, at least its first half, is ‘what if two enterprising gangsters bucked the trend of the Great Migration. Instead of fleeing the Jim Crow South just to endure a new kind of redlined racism and exclusion in the Northern cities, tried to build their space that is for us, by us?” When Sammie mentions in earnest that “I heard they don’t have Jim Crow up there. Black man can go where he wants”, the twins reply that the grass isn’t always greener. Chicago is no different to Mississippi except it has skyscrapers and no plantations: “We came back home to deal with the devil we know.”
Soon enough, the rest of the supporting cast enter. They recruit piano and harmonica blues musician Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a carouser with a golden spirit. Smoke recruits his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosako), a hoodoo practitioner and the closest Sinners has to a Van Helsing figure. Stack’s ex-inamorata, Mary, (Hailee Steinfeld) shows up to berate Stack for being caddish towards her. She is an Octoroon reverse-Sarah Jane Johnson from Imitation of Life who passes as white, lives easily in the white part of town, but doesn’t want to be ‘white’; black people, in her eyes and heart, are her kin. There is also Sammie’s love interest, the married singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson). Then there is the Chinese couple who runs two shops in town and provides material support to the twins’ efforts to start their jukebox joint — Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bow Chow (Yao), who have an adolescent daughter, Lisa (Helena Hu). Being Chinese in the deep South, their involvement perhaps signifies a solidarity of the marginalised, especially given that the real-life Chinese settlers of the Mississippi Delta were recruited as migrant labourers to supplement the black sharecroppers. But they also exist as a middleman-minority in a community sharply divided along black or white, able to adeptly transact with both sides. Moreover, their presence is a reminder that the South is characterised by a more complex diversity than is often acknowledged.
As their party reaches its zenith, a wild turn is taken, and Sinners quickly becomes a Dusk Till Dawn style vampire horror blood-fest until its end.
Sinners has many strengths. Coogler, to his credit, places a strong emphasis on patiently developing both the main and supporting characters, and that’s one of the things that really sets this film apart. When the horror and chaos finally hit, the stakes feel deeper. The characters’ survival, their deaths, their choices, all of it carries more weight. To boot, Sinners is just sexy and entertaining. It has some wild dialogue that actors sell the hell out of, especially Hailee Steinfeld who has a tough role with some very graphic lines that she commits to so well, that otherwise might’ve easily been bungled in embarrassing ways.
The music design and soundtrack was incredible and did a great job of making multi-cultural/multi-genre influences feel cohesive, thus nicely complimenting the plot’s own genre blending. It also supports one of the main ideas of the films: that music is so powerful that it can pierce the veil between past, present and future to the point of nirvana. But this power is double edged. It can also summon dark forces that will lead to destruction and chaos.
This is why the main villainous vampire Remmick takes an interest in Sammie, the preacher boy. He senses the power of his musical gifts and wants it. A surface level viewing will see Remmick as another culture vulture, an evil ‘cracker’ out to plunder black culture and then pass it as his own. But his character is more subtle and complex than that. He is an ancient vampire who has lived long before the racial categories of ‘white’ and ‘black’ were even a thing. His first victims of the film are Ku Klux Klan members who he turns into vampires. He doesn’t use any racial slurs. Indeed, he sincerely believes his vampirism offers an alternative “fellowship and love” against the divisions that lay on earth. Perhaps it’s a radically assimilationist ‘fellowship’ that subsumes black, particularity under the faux-universalism of Remmick’s vampiric theology. In any case, this is a false salvation: given that vampires are cursed with immortality and having to constantly feast on human blood to survive.
It’s no accident that Remmick is Irish. As summarised in Noel Ignatiev’s book, “How the Irish Became White,” historically there were many similarities between the Irish and Black Americans. Both groups were victims of systemic oppression (The Irish under the yoke of the British crown and discrimination when they arrived in America, Black people under the American slave trade and Jim Crow apartheid). Irish people were often referred to as the blacks of Europe. Moreover, in cities like New York, they lived cheek by jowl as neighbours, even as intertwined families. There is very much an overlooked history of cultural exchange in music and dance between both groups. This included the blending of African American Juba (or ‘plantation dance’) and the Irish jig, which evolved into tap dance. Remmick’s very presence is a testament to this complicated history before the assimilation of the Irish and their particular ethnic culture into the racial ideology of ‘whiteness’ as a consequence of their general assimilation into America.
Sinners is obviously a good film – very good in fact – but in some quarters it is a tad overhyped one. There is a consensus forming that it is an apogee of 2025. The word “masterpiece” has been flung around a lot among film influencers. Perhaps I am being an ‘elitist’ but I don’t think the word ‘masterpiece’ ought to be dispensed upon any film that is above average and isn’t corporate/IP driven slop when words like ‘very good’ or ‘great’ does it enough justice. The chief reason why Sinners isn’t a masterpiece is that the vampire element isn’t as fully interwoven throughout the film as it should’ve been, making it look more tacked on, squashed in as an afterthought. Leaving the impression that there may actually be two films, a coming-of-age story of a blues musician caught between his artistic desires and the restrictions of his religious background, and a vampire horror fest that’s uncomfortably stitched together rather than a solid whole. When it comes to blending captivating original music with mesmerising cinematography, Coogler has proven that he is as good as anyone.
When it comes to blending period realism with supernatural horror then there’s improvement to be had.
Nevertheless, Ryan Coogler has made five films in his career thus far. He has yet to make a certifiably bad film. That is more than you can say for a lot of directors. “Sinners” works more than it doesn’t. Even though it doesn’t all gel, it, nevertheless, still makes for an enjoyable cinematic experience.
Ralph Leonard is a British Nigerian journalist, writer, commentator & cinema critic with works published by well-known media outlets including: ‘The Atlantic’, ‘The Telegraph’ & ‘The New Statesman’
E-mail: ralphy96@hotmail.co.uk
Twitter/X: @buffsoldier_96
Minor edits & title: L. Fenton
Article written & edited by Ralph Leonard