SINNERS (2025)

It’s one thing to hear some kids say “Star Wars is great because it’s a Vietnam War allegory.” If that’s the standard by which they rationalise their enjoyment of something so obviously and frivolously fun, it’s pointless then to break their bubbles; a few harmless chuckles would do. It’s quite another matter when you hear similar foolishness coming from the mouths of literate, grown adults. Sinners “is smart horror, even poetic at times, with much to say about race and spiritual freedom”, The Hollywood Reporter proclaimed. The new Ryan Coogler vampire horror film is his “most personal story yet, infusing a love of music with family history that grounds this supernatural thriller in something tangible and real”, said SlashFilm. 

It’s not so surprising that most reviewers would greet such an “original idea” and “fresh take” of a movie with a commensurate sensitivity apparent in their ‘graduation ceremony’ stuffiness—“powerful”, “allegorical”, “painful”, “brilliant”, “compelling”, “incredible”, “thematic”, and, apparently, “metaphysical”. They toss words out like they know exactly what they mean, and spin descriptions into acclamations: that’s almost true by definition (“definition” as in “job description”). As time goes on, you learn to ignore those silly numbers on Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic because you know that most of the reviews they collect are lousy fillers. There are observant writers, to be sure (I’m thinking of David Ehrlich, Zachary Barnes, a few others). 

What is surprising is that many of them, too, had also given in this time to unearned hype against their better judgement. There’s no telling why critics and audiences alike have so overwhelmingly reacted as if the picture was onto something, but a few speculations may be in order.

As entertainment, Sinners serves, but no more than From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), the influence of which is all too obvious, and it’s mustier and less fun. They say that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads to become a guitarist of such finesse that can’t ever be matched by mortals. It’s credit to Coogler that he sees the myth-making potential in the rural Jim Crow South that Johnson, Lead Belly, and Mississippi John Hurt sang about and were a part of—about poor people with dreams and desires but no hope nor pleasure, burdened with onerous work, subject to shocking violence from within and without, filled with fear and suffering, and irrepressible longings for some simple pleasures in life, which was the genesis of delta blues. But Coogler’s idea of a myth is rather literal-minded (not unlike a Marvel Studios production), which is fatal: a people’s spirit for escape and freedom, their emotional refuge in their music, has been lost to the “meanings” about “healing” and “sin” that contemporary outsiders have projected onto them, and what’s left is stiflingly self-serious and affectatious. 

It all concerns Sammie (Miles Caton) the aspiring blues guitarist during the Depression, a young sharecropper down in the fields of Clarksdale, Mississippi (where delta blues was said to have been born), and son of a local preacher (Saul Williams) who warns him to leave his “sinning ways” behind—sinning, because he played to drunkards, played for unadulterated pleasure and material wealth. When his twin cousins ‘Smoke’ and ‘Stack’ (Michael B. Jordan)—an obvious homage to “Smokestack Lightning”, a blues tune of Howlin’ Wolf’s that’s also heard in the film—came back from Al Capone’s Chicago and the European trenches of World War I, they got together and opened a juke joint at a sawmill bought from a white owner with their gangster money. Among those who joined their company was a mixed-race ex-girlfriend of Stack’s (Hailee Steinfeld), an almost ex-wife of Smoke’s (Wunmi Mosaku), a lover-at-first-sight of Sammie’s (Jayme Lawson), a Chinese shopkeeper couple (Li Jun Li & Yao), a cotton cropper who goes by ‘Cornbread’ (Omar Benson Miller), and a harmonica-playing pianist (Delroy Lindo). 

There’s no doubt about the sincerity that’s here, and Coogler’s filmmaking is by no means shoddy. Watching the quick bursts of match cutaways in the beginning where the preacher’s actions were juxtaposed with the traumatic violence that Sammie endured before setting foot in the house of God, foretelling the misfortunes, whatever they may be, that’s to come, I could almost see what the press was on about by “inventive” and “audacious”, even though when the actual thing came it wasn’t nearly as horrifying as the cuts made it out to be. Part of the appeal must be the film’s reputation as a sort of last stand against the monopolisation of IP-driven franchise schlock, a maliciously idiotic idea that David Zaslav, CEO of the production company (Warner Bros.) that produced this film, has been very keen on, and Coogler’s attempts at virtuoso and social importance can only affirm the audience’s confidence in the belief that they’re seeing something special. 

Perhaps it’s also the general impression that nobody could’ve come up with the idea of a vampire horror in the context of a Southern Gothic drama except Ryan Coogler, hence all the “inventive” and “audacious” talk. Maybe there’s been so little in the way of entertainment that could live up to the reputation of “art” that people are desperate to latch onto anything they can. As it’s long been pointed out, you’ll have a hard time finding anything original on the highest-grossing list of these past few years, and Coogler, being among the luckier Marvel veterans whose clout extends beyond his superhero blockbusters, Black Panther (2018) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022), must seem to some people that he’s uniquely positioned to reassert the status of la politique des auteurs in the industry. 

What complicates this is, regrettably, that his thinking and technique are essentially no different from Marvel’s. I won’t dwell on him treating such music references as the “killing floor” like a grating Marvel easter egg, but Autumn Arkapaw’s cinematography and Michael Shawver’s editing were highly uneven. The whole look reeks of a thick studio air: it’s lit, angled, framed, characterised, plotted so unremarkably it’s like the blockbuster cheese that gets routinely streamlined out of the anus of modern Hollywood. Shots such as a partial right-to-left arc around Michael B. Jordan leaning against his automobile before the second Michael B. Jordan is revealed, slowly emerging from the side, or the track behind a Chinese girl’s (Helena Hu) neck as she was making her way from the side of the street populated with Blacks to the other side where the Whites were more numerous, find themselves in the company of shots in which nothing visually was going on. Dialogue scenes were the worst offenders: they are blocked thoughtlessly, with characters blandly framed and positioned, often smack dab in the middle but never exactly, with no sense of compositional geometry nor any feeling for the milieu, as if it’s made for classic TV; the background was rarely in focus, and very little of its details emerge. 

The performers try to liven things up, but they have nothing much to work with to shape their characters. Miles Caton has a pleasant, deep tone that gives you a feeling of warmth; you grow to like him, even though he wasn’t around as much as you’d like. Delroy Lindo gave perhaps the best performance in this film. He was the gravelly harmonica player Stack and Sammie picked up at the station, Delta Slim, who gave a likeable impression of a street performer and was lively without ever overstating himself. No effort was made to develop the dynamic between the two Jordans, which really seemed like a waste of opportunity because he’s one of the more talented young actors around. Whoever coached the accents, on the other hand, they really did the magic. It’s the cast’s saving grace: for once in a period piece, you’re not irritated by the feeling that these people are overworking their twang to “come across”. 

Werner Herzog put himself through hell trying to make that image of a steamboat on the side of a hill come alive in Fitzcarraldo (1982); Akira Kurosawa must have had the slaughter at the third castle and the battles near the end in mind when he shot Ran (1985). I have a similar suspicion that Coogler had wanted the sequence of Sammie’s juke joint performance, where we track around the room through the rapper and the griots he “conjured” as music genres mush together into one cacophonous hodgepodge, with everyone in the room eventually dancing in the fire, even before he began writing Sinners. No doubt audiences take this almost bombastic quality as something to behold, the same way they behold the enormous sandworms in Dune (2021) or the beautiful explosion in Oppenheimer (2023). I don’t think it’s a sequence that works, promising as it might look in one’s imagination: the musicians “conjured” look so confused you’re tempted to cringe, and no one performance was given enough attention except the tracking camera itself, so nothing really shines, and everything felt mechanical because they seem aware they’re the puppets of a ‘larger point’. 

“There are musicians whose skill can heal communities but also summon evil”, so we’re told in the prologue. This sequence literally feels as if the film was afraid that we would forget, so it took the trouble to literally tell us again word for word. Except for a post-credits scene, the movie never gave us an uninterrupted blues performance to sink our teeth into, and it was supposed to be about blues (delta blues no less: most of the blues heard were electric blues, and very little of the rural delta sound came through; this was no doubt because of concerns for commercial appeal). Amadeus (1984) was about how incomparable talent invites destruction and self-destruction, and the idea takes root naturally in the drama like any great allegory would, so the “message” doesn’t feel tacked on or imposed upon. What does Sammie’s music “heal” in Sinners? How was the wisdom the film was more than happy to tell us straight? 

Several critics took notice of the problematic pacing. I think the problem goes much farther: the film’s structure has no balance. There was little foreboding on the way to mayhem, and not even a cheeky surprise turn like in From Dusk Till Dawn. All the buildup, which was bearable but needlessly wordy and overlong, was laid to waste once the payoff sets in, not only because of the priority shifts to bombastic action and thrills in the third act, but that everything that came before didn’t feel like they dramatically impinged upon the things to come, so you began to realise that all that talk of “dancing with the devil” was nil: those vampires just happened to be at the right place and the right time. The drama, already six feet deep in the mire, is dead on arrival, and the ending shootout where Smoke somehow single-handedly takes out a whole gang of racist mobsters just plainly felt like a needless obligation, a ritual to satisfy the plot’s requirement that somebody has to die in the end. 

The reason why the genre fusion of thriller-drama and vampire horror was more excusable on the turf of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez was that they were merely looking for a hell of a good time, and they got it. Their vampires weren’t supposed to make any sense or represent anything, knowing that the clichés have all been done to death, and all the Victorian symbology has waned so much by the postmodernist age that there’s really nothing left to be done, short of a conscious spoof like From Dusk Till Dawn and The Lost Boys (1987), or a complete revamp of the genre.

Coogler’s period setting may have been the only thing that saved his conception from totally collapsing: when Stack and Mary stepped through the doors of 21st-century in mid-credit scene to pay their visit to old Sammie (Buddy Guy), they can’t look like they’re anything else than self-parody even if they tried not to. And is vampirism really the best analogy to draw for the premise that Coogler had in mind? It’s known in the music world that blues often carried a sexual connotation that the white public initially took offence at. And who knows? Tusky creatures who traditionally symbolised uncontrollable horniness might just be the ones who bought Robert Johnson’s soul on the cheap. But that’s not the direction that Coogler went with. His vampires had a particular burden that should seem weird for the genre freaks: they must now take on the baggage of representing “hate” (as Mosaku’s character explained). 

What “hate”? Vampires here are still playing by all the rules in the playbook. They bit, they flew, they ran from garlic, they hid from sunlight, and they looked like baddies; sure they like their share of harmless squabbling with the humans they remember, but the thing they want is still their blood. Ah, but they don’t so much do the “hating” as concealing or translating it. As critic Richard Brody spelled out for us: “evil isn’t in the music but comes from the outside and finds the music. The movie’s pivot to vampires is a supernatural vision of the real-life snares set for great Black musicians”:

The diabolical metaphysics of Coogler’s Clarksdale blues are centred not on the creation of music but on its dissemination—on the fate of a community-based creator in society at large. The movie’s leading vampire, named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), is also a musician—a white cultural appropriator who schemes, with soft words and sharp teeth, to get hold of the music played by Sammie, Slim, and other Black musicians in their circle. He wants their songs and their stories, he says—but, of course, he has nothing of the experience or the history that gave rise to them. “Sinners” features only two kinds of white people—Hogwood and his crew of violent racists, and Remmick and his cohort, whose violence is hidden under the guise of love. The vampires present themselves as warmhearted integrationists, but their egalitarian welcome comes at the price of their victims’ souls—even while bestowing on them the ironic gift of immortality (of the literal sort). Their bites turn Black victims into vampires who willingly integrate—and who turn into similarly smiling predators all too comfortable with their new, culturally homogenized surroundings, as if suggesting a metaphysical form of the pitfalls awaiting artists whose parasitic acolytes lead them to the blandishments of crossover.

Vampires have been integrated into mass culture for so long now that all their mythic appeal has long been dissipated. As a metaphor for cultural appropriation and assimilation, I fear at the very least that Coogler would have to do a lot more than assume that we, the audience, know all the tricks in the playbook: that playbook is what he needs to throw out of the window, so he could rethink these ghastly, lovely things from scratch to suit his thematic purpose; as they stand, they’re just vampires, and that pop-culture literalness makes even that loveless lust under their skin seem obvious. It’s too popularised to acquire any sense of mythology or folklore.

Of course, audiences will be heard saying “What a fresh twist! The whole vampire situation is really revealing of how corrupt and racist white liberal culture is, and how the white music industry it dominates gave themselves all the credit for black people’s creation,” the same way people came out of The Shining (1980) rambling about how the white men in power marginalised and oppressed minorities from the Natives to the Blacks for as long as the nation’s been founded.

Richard Brody of The New Yorker, who had enough sense to pan The Brutalist (2024), Nosferatu (2024), A Complete Unknown (2024), Civil War (2024), Perfect Days (2023), Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), in a row of releases that didn’t deserve the amount of critical goodwill they received, was one of the more competent critics who gave Sinners glowing praise. He called this “view of myth” of Coogler’s “sharply revisionist”, which is a slightly more extravagant way of saying that it’s (simply) different from a tale of selling one’s soul, not unlike how Iron Man is “sharply revisionist” when compared to Captain America since one is self-made and the other is serum-made. Before vampires turned up around the halfway mark (out of nowhere, one might add), the film was a “tensely realistic” “work of minutely observed historical fiction.” He was generous enough to exemplify the part about “tensely realistic” and “minutely observed” (we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and not count plot synopsis as part of the “realism” and “observation”):

There are quick but indelible glimpses of signs for the whites-only ticket booth, waiting room, and rest room; when Stack, seeing a white woman nearby, orders Sammie to avert his eyes and walk away, the screen shivers with the ambient terror underlying the banalities of segregation.

Curious idea of “realism” and “observation”! The specific scene he refers to took place at the train station, and there’s only one problem with it: nobody noticed it. If I recall, the whole thing lasts about a second (“quick” indeed), and you can’t tell if Sammie even noticed her like Stack did, or just happened to have his head turned that way, casually taking in whatever’s around him—seen far away from the camera’s POV, she’s a detail in the background like all the other extras, so our implicit assumption was that he’s taking in the view.

My money’s on the likelihood of him being piqued by the Black guitarist playing not far from her, but you can’t tell for sure: the scene was not framed or blocked such that his face or action was ever in focus. Stack’s face was in focus, as he was casually calling on Sammie to move on from the guitarist and catch up (could it be that the sound mixing was so awful that the three or four syllables from Stack’s mouth didn’t sound like a warning to “avert his eyes and walk away”?). The scene was so insignificant it can’t even be said to have been skimmed through or brushed over (“indelible” indeed); perhaps that’s Brody’s idea of “minute observation”. It’s not the scene itself that I’m getting at, though, which was perfectly harmless and probably not intended for the effect it appeared to have on Brody. It’s Brody’s seeing the phantom of “ambient terror” that intrigues me.

USA | 2025 | 138 MINUTES | 2.76:1 • 1.43:1 • 1.90:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

writer & director: Ryan Coogler.
starring: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Miller & Delroy Lindo.