Review: Sinners (2025)

Sinners

Rating

Director

Ryan Coogler

Screenplay

Ryan Coogler

Length

2h 17m

Starring

Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Benson Miller, Delroy Lindo, Peter Dreimanis, Lola Kirke, Li Jun Li, Saul Williams, Yao, David Maldonado, Helena Hu, Andrene Ward-Hammond, Nathaniel Arcand, Emonie Ellison

MPAA Rating

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Review

Horror as a framework for the exploration of challenging topics isn’t a modern concept but Black filmmakers have done a terrific job using the medium to explore concepts of otherness and discrimination through the genre’s lens with Sinners another success.

Brothers Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (Michael B. Jordan) have returned to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi to open a juke joint. Their criminal syndicate interactions in Chicago have made them tough, confident and wealthy enough to buy property from a white landowner. To make their opening night a success, they hire musicians Sammie (Miles Caton), Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), and Pearline (Jayme Lawson); suppliers Bo (Yao) and Grace Chow (Li Jun Li); bouncer Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller); cook Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), who is also Smoke’s estranged wife; and Stack’s passé-blanc ex Mary (Hailee Steinfeld).

As the narrator explains, Sammie is a once-in-a-generation voice that has the ability to bridge the gap between the living, the dead, and the future but whose music draws danger to those around him. This manifests in the arrival of a trio of vampires who want to welcome the crowd at the juke joint into their throng.

Director Ryan Coogler also writes the screenplay and fuses this 1932-set feature with the Antebellum attitude towards the Black community with a modernist frame of mind. Much like the benevolent northerner concept brilliantly pulled off in Jordan Peele’s Get Out, Coogler uses the white vampires and their insistence on integration as a symbolic representation of northern whites acting as if they are working for the Black citizen’s benefit but whose approach is less deadly but no less insidious than active Ku Klux Klan members, who get their moment in the film to ooze as well.

Coogler’s eye for detail keeps a screenplay afloat that has a handful of flaws. There are two major plot points that are either lost entirely or which feel tacked on in nature. The first is a scene early on when a group of Native American vampire hunters arrive at the home of a white couple who’ve already been turned and then they disappear into the night never to be seen again. The moment may establish the nature of these primary villains, which up to that point was still a mystery, but it ends quickly and then is dropped entirely. The other relates to a dawn conflict that suddenly feels like a codicil to a movie that should have been over by that point. It’s these two moments that make the film feel both incomplete and overstuffed.

The horror tropes Coogler employs are familiar to most fans of the genre and feel fitting as the order in which characters are turned near perfectly matches the assimilation order these groups would have historically been absorbed. It isn’t a perfect order but the attempt to fit that in metaphorically is compelling.

Without his stars, though, Coogler’s attempts would have been in vain and he secured a stellar group of actors. Jordan is terrific as Smoke and Stack giving each unique characteristics that made them easily identifiable with a little assist from costume designer Ruth E. Carter. Caton can sing the hell out of his moments in the film and finish that off with some solid acting. Mosaku is wonderful in what feels like a genuine breakthrough despite her appearance in several blockbusters in the last two decades. Lindo’s performance is far too brief but his brash manner is easily replaced by a self-sacrificing nature that gives his final scene some added poignance. Steinfeld is dependable as always and the rest of the cast is the tops but extra praise should be heaped on the underrecognized Jack O’Connell. He turns the head vampire Remmick into someone with dimension whose honeyed words initially carry a weight of importance but whose attitude slowly becomes dangerous the more he’s rebuffed. Without O’Connell’s performance, the unnerving third act wouldn’t have the same dramatic tension.

Despite their financial success, the brothers Moore have learned hard and fast that they must fight for everything they have in a world that sees them as something lesser. Although they hope that their juke joint will be a success, they are wary of influences that could undermine it and that caution helps them survive some of the more deadly threats around them even if death proves to be in the cards for many of them. This is the premise with which Sinners excels. Voicing the decades of discrimination, both hostile and benevolent, in a fantastical but accessible way gives the film weight with audiences. It can be a bit obvious with its themes and outcomes but that won’t stop audiences from enjoying it even if many of them might not get some of the more subtle metaphors.