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PORTSIDE CULTURE

‘SINNERS’ REVIEW: RYAN COOGLER’S BRILLIANTLY STAGED,
SUBTEXT-RICH VAMPIRE MOVIE  
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Jake Cole
April 15, 2025
Slant
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_ Sinners is one of the most distinctive, confident mainstream films
of the modern era. _

, Photo: Warner Bros.

 

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_
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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.

[YouTube video]

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_
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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_
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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_
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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 [[link removed]]

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.

* sinners
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* jim crow
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* Great Depression
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* Mississippi
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* Ryan Coogler
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* Michael B. Jordan
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* Black Film
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* culture vulturism
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* blues
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