Ryan Coogler may be the most under-the-radar director working in Hollywood today. He’s done Marvel movies (Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever). He’s won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award (Fruitvale Station). He’s made a Rocky franchise movie (Creed). And every step of the way, he’s brought his main man, actor Michael B. Jordan, along with him. Welp, they’re at it again with the supernatural thriller Sinners.
Set in the thirties, Sinners stars Jordan as the Smokestack Twins, Smoke and Stack, two brothers who come back to their small plantation town in Mississippi after seven years of working for the mob in Chicago. The twins have a plan to open a juke joint, and with the help of their friends and family, they put together the booze, food, and entertainment to do it. But the music that’s played in the joint attracts a presence that is not just seedy, it’s downright evil.
At the risk of spoiling something that has been spoiled by the marketing anyway, that evil presence is vampires. A group of vampires show up to ruin everyone’s good time. But these are not just normal vampires. Well, they are in the respect that they have to stay out of the sunlight, need to be invited in before they can enter a place, and can be killed with a stake through the heart. But these vampires are something more. They survive and thrive on music, and more specifically, on the people who make it.
Coogler’s Sinners screenplay is not your grandfather’s vampire movie, even if it is set almost a hundred years ago. Coogler masterfully reinvents a genre that, frankly, has been second only to zombies in how played out it has been recently. Sinners makes vampires fresh again, undoing years of post-Twilight saturation with two hours and seventeen minutes of creative storytelling.
There is a clear From Dusk Till Dawn influence in Sinners. There are actually two movies at work here, one about the twins getting their juke joint up and running, and another about the evil beings that want to take it down. But there’s also a Robert Johnson/Crossroads mythology nod, as the head vampire (played by Jack O’Connell from Back to Black) seems more interested in the particular soul of young bluesman Sammie Moore (rising R&B star Miles Caton), who happens to be the Smokestack Twins’ cousin. And with tensions simmering between Sammie and the brothers, the talented musician is tempted with a way to make his dreams come true.
So, like From Dusk Till Dawn, Sinners starts out as one movie and winds up as a completely different one. Over the course of one long night, things go from party time to fight-for-your-life.
Michael B. Jordan has an absolute field day with his portrayal of the twins. Smoke and Stack are, while obviously similar in many ways, completely different characters, and Jordan plays up the subtle variations in them perfectly. After a while, it’s easy to forget that Smoke and Stack are the same actor, which is as much a tribute to Ryan Coogler and his team as it is to Jordan—the twinning is seamless. And these guys don’t just stand on different sides of the frame Brady Bunch-style; Smoke and Stack interact constantly, doing everything from hugging to fighting, and having them both played by the same actor is an impressive feat of filmmaking, both creatively and technically.
Of course, the music in Sinners is extremely important to the overall effect of the movie. Ludwig Göransson’s score leans heavily on the delta blues but also injects a modern element that moves the story along while still managing to keep everything period correct. The soundtrack includes collaborations with the likes of, among others, Rhiannon Giddens, Cedric Burnside, Brittany Howard, and James Blake, as well as contributions from cast members Miles Caton and Lola Kirke (who plays one of the vampires). The whole backbone of the story is the connection between music and dark forces, and the score put together by Göransson and his conspirators is terrific.
So, as might be evident from everything that’s been said up until now, Sinners is a horror movie. But it’s not a typical exploitative, blood-and-guts horror movie. Of course, there’s plenty of blood and guts, but Sinners is way more plot-driven than your typical suck-your-blood vampire movie. It deals heavily with frightening ideas and concepts, and seeing as how it’s set in the Jim Crow-era South, it’s not all fantasy and legend. The shadow of the Ku Klux Klan and post-slavery racism looms over the entire movie, so there are daylight threats as well as moonlit ones. And, from the juke joint’s perspective, it’s hard to say which is scarier.
Although he may not be a household name, it’s very clear that Ryan Coogler knows how to make a movie, and Sinners proves that he can work in the schlocky genres without making actual schlock. Sinners is not just an amazing horror movie; it’s an amazing movie, period.
Oh, and be sure to stick around after the end for a mid-credits scene, which is very significant to the story. And which features a pretty cool cameo. Shhhh!
GRADE: A
Rating: R for sexual content, language, and strong bloody violence
Release Date: April 18, 2025
Running Time: 2 hours 17 minutes
Studio: Warner Bros Pictures
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