Sinners (2025)

 

    Heavy spoiler alert. 

Seriously, everything is on the table here. 

Do NOT read this if you haven't had the chance to see this yet.

Go buy tickets, go watch this, then come back here.

    

    I've rewritten this like five times, it always starts to sound like a review. This is not a review, there's quite literally no unique verbiage I could use to contribute to the discourse surrounding Coogler's Sinners that isn't already being flung around like embers in a forest fire. This movie is that good. This is the best movie of the decade. This is the best movie that's come out in my lifetime. This is one of the single greatest fucking uses of a camera in history.

This is one of the most effective scores in movie history.

This is some of the most well manicured set design in movie history.

This is one of the best ensemble casts in movie history.

This is some of the best cinematography in movie history.

This is one of the most accurate representations of the Delta in movie history.

This is some of the best costuming in movie history.

Are you starting to get the idea?

If movies had Michelin stars this would have four of them. I have half the mind to tell you to get in a car and drive to whatever the closest fucking cinema is that offers 15-Perf IMAX screenings of this, of which there are allegedly only 5 screens in America, and 10 total worldwide.

I've seen people fling around the term "slow burn" and I disagree with that framing. Calling the movie a "slow burn" suggests that large parts of the movie are at best slow, or at worst, boring. This is not that, from the moment the movie begins and you're given a look at a boy who looks like he just survived a bear mauling walking into a church, there's an immediate intrigue. The movie then rolls into following an insatiably enigmatic performance from Michael B. Jordan who plays both Smoke, and his twin brother, Stack.

Sure, if you know the movie is about vampires going in, then I can see how "slow burn" might be appropriate, as many critics have likened Sinners to From Dusk Till Dawn, the vampirics are reserved until the film's third act, and when it happens, it's violent, visceral, and bloody. Until then, however, you're roped into the well-realized and compelling microcosm of 1930s Clarksdale, Mississippi. Every single actor is played to perfection, with no character feeling redundant or flat. Every character serves an integral purpose to move the film forward. From the green and unprecedented Miles Caton to the storied and legendary Delroy Lindo, everyone matters. Which makes the third act that much more gut wrenching and important.

Not too long ago I was talking to my lifetime movie buddy, Geezaws' mom, telling her that while I love vampire movies, and have been lucky enough to see many great ones (most recently Eggers' Nosferatu), all of them have either adaptations or direct remakes of Bram Stoker's Dracula. In Sinners, my desire to see a movie that isn't Bram Stoker's Dracula, was realized; and it isn't even really fucking about vampires.

To me, and most, vampires have long served as an allegory for sexual consent, while truly realized for the first time in Stoker's masterwork, it would be continuously interpreted as such through various adaptations (see: any vampire art from Japanese artist Takato Yamamoto). While Coogler's interpretation is by no means lacking in sex (and holy shit is it both equal parts incredibly raunchy and purposeful), his vampires serve a dual purpose of both being the blood sucking demon's rooted in Eastern European folklore we've all grown to love, and a metaphor for the manner in which America as a country can (and does) force itself onto the cultures of the peoples it loves to act like it welcomes.

There's a one shot in this movie, the one pretty much everyone is talking about (seriously if you haven't seen this movie, I'm begging you, stop reading this now), that left me literally slack-jawed and on the verge of tears.

During the movie's second act, Caton's "Preacher boy" Sammy Moore is singing an original blues song at the Smoke Stack Brothers' newly built Juke Joint, and the blues radiates through the otherwise silent night, drawing a trio of vampires in, like smelling grandma's bread through the backyard window. As Sammy sings, the camera pans out and around the joint as a narrator speaks of the timeless impact of black music, and how that music, that rhythm, transcends the laws of time and space to connect black people, stretching from the ancestral African communities from which they were taken, to more contemporary realizations. The camera pans around the party in one continuous, mesmerizing shot, and before your mind can really process what you're seeing, you've already seen characters in this 1930s party dressed in ways resembling the legendary Jimi Hendrix, the legendary members of Run DMC, and various others from periods of time in which black people have contributed to the rise or outright creation of global music genres; pretty much all of them when it comes to American history.

Caton's "Preacher Boy" himself is a reference to the now near mythical, blues musician of the same era, Robert Leroy Johnson. We'll get back to Mr. Johnson shortly.

As the camera swept through the room I could not fathom the magnitude of what I was watching, this was new cinema, this was unprecedented, this was something that had never been attempted before and shares no DNA with anything that had come before it, but will hopefully birth an endless list of homages moving forward. You don't see a scene like this very often, I haven't seen one like this in 25 years, and I've seen a lot of movies, so I doubt you have either.

Throughout the movie there are suggestions that the blues is "devils muisc", least of which comes from Sammy's pastor father, who tells him that, should he keep playing music and not return to the church, one day, the devil himself would follow Sammy home, and eventually, it does.

Throughout the late 1930s, an enigmatic blues singer would rise, one so capable and Midas-like, named Robert Leroy Johnson. Johnson was so good, in fact, that legends would rise accusing him of having one day gotten to a crossroads where the devil had tuned his guitar in exchange for his soul. He would die at the age of 27, just 2 years after releasing his more well-received and notable works, but 9 years into his career total. A discussion about the mortality rates and life expectancy of Delta Black Americans aside, his untimely death, ironically, would make him immortal.

Coogler's devil, interestingly enough, is also first seen at a bit of a literal crossroads (I'm stretching it here). Running from Choctaw vampire hunters, Jack O'Connell's Remmick happens upon a house where he seeks refuge, only to find out it's inhabited by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Appealing to their melanin-hating sensibilities, they invite Remmick into their home where he can safely hide from the Choctaw. Shortly thereafter, Remmick would convert the bed sheet wearing bastards into the substantially more tolerable vampires. It's important to note that Remmick is of Irish descent, while the newly adopted Klansmen are of shithole descent. Upon their conversion, however, it seems as though they abandon their prejudices in favor of egalitarian bloodlust. This is also incredibly important for both the story and the meta narrative.

Back at the party, as Sammy is singing his transcendental tune, the vampires overhear the sweet sounds of "the devils music" and decide they want Sammy's music for themselves, for eternity. It's here where Coogler flips the switch from a period piece drama to a visceral, blood soaked slasher, as vampire activities ensue with the explicit intention of Remmick and Co. to abduct Preacher Boy from the party and convert him to make his music theirs. Remmick tries to effectively seduce Sammy (yelling from outside the party, this is a vampire movie and vampires ain't coming in unless they're invited) by performing an Irish Dance with all of his newfound vampire friends. It's important to note that at this point of the movie, most of the party has been converted, meaning that this vampire community now includes irish people, reformed klansmen, black people, and chinese people. All of whom, for lack of a better term, "don't see color" anymore on account of their new ascended (or descended) nature.

On a literal level, Remmick is trying to convince Sammy that there's a means by which he can escape the reality of being in Jim Crowe America, live forever, and have his music in tow. 

On a subtextual level, though, the movie really spreads it's expansive wings in a way only Ryan Coogler has really been able to accomplish in recent years.

As a Black American living in Mississippi in the 1930s, Sammy is alive during a time where white Americans were really starting to forcefully appropriate Black culture into their lives. America were just starting to really see the intermingling of mixed race Americans with Black communities (see: Hailee Steinfeld's Mary). What Remmick is proposing here is less the literal immortality of Miles and his music, and more so the assimilation Sammy could have if he were to just "let America have him". While that's an alluring promise on the surface, it would mean that Sammy would have to abandon his community, his family, and join the bloodsucking machine that is America. 

Herein lies the timeless and multicultural connection that Sinners offers. While no group of Americans have been appropriated nearly as frequently or as violently as Black Americans, the Chinese, Irish, (and more recently Arabs, Indians, etc.) have all been subject to the underhanded promise of assimilating into America.

Once an immigrant (willing or unwilling) arrives in America, they are given the opportunity to give up everything that makes them them in service of making America seem more multicultural, at the expense of their own independent identity. Whether it's black music, hookah, St. Patrick's day, or tandoori chicken, everything that comes to America must be of all of America to appease the metaphorically blood-sucking society. Should you submit to this offer, you're to strip yourself of your allegiances to your own heritage and independence in service of the larger machine, though your offerings will be immortal and continue to live on in American history for all time. Should you refuse, however, you and your culture will continue to be hunted, sometimes violently, for the rest of your life. 

This is really accented at the end of the movie when it shows us that Sammy had managed to escape becoming a vampire for his whole life, he's now an old man singing at a Juke Joint in 1990s Chicago. Backstage after the show, he's visited by a still youthful Stack and Mary, who'd been vampires since the attack on the Joint 60 years prior. The pair ask Sammy to play that "real" music, not the "electric shit" one more time for old times sake, and Sammy obliges. Before they leave, however, Sammy asks Stack what he thought of that night before the sun went down and the vampirics ensued, because for him it was the best day of his life. Stack replies with a devastating response that unravels the whole movie; for a moment, they were free.

To say I was on the verge of tears for a second time is an understatement, I was welling up, which is not something that normally happens to me with movies or much media. However, the idea that the vampire's promise of immortality, a color-blind world, and a new community once again shackled, was heartbreaking.

The vampires are not white people, the vampires are America, and the manner in which it appropriates people from all walks of life on the promise of freedom and acceptance in return, only to strip you of your identity and render you an impersonal cog in a machine.

When I say that I've spent years wanting a vampire movie that wasn't Dracula, I meant that, while I appreciate the staple trait of vampires being a metaphor for sexual consent, I wanted them to represent something else. In Sinners, vampires represent the very unique and violent strain of American appropriation, and how it affects everyone who comes here.

And no other group of Americans, rather, no other group of people world wide, know the reality of this situation more than Black America.

90 years ago, legend says that a black man found himself at a crossroads in Mississippi where the devil offered him success in music, in exchange for his soul. In 2025, Ryan Coogler has successfully managed to visualize the sinister nature of how America has continuously managed to make similar deals with protected communities.

One thing remains clear; no matter how much America takes, it cannot take the soul, the rhythm, it cannot take that which it cannot possibly understand. America cannot take the Blues. No, the Blues belong to Johnson, Hendrix, Jackson, and Lamar. This music is felt through generations, and no matter what form it takes, it is music inspired by the beauty of perseverance, culture, and and a real transcendental soul so ineffable that it's as magical as any immortal creature of folklore. How truly refreshing it is to get a period movie about Black Americans that isn't sadistic torture porn that constantly portrays Black Americans as helpless victims, but rather the beauty within such communities.

Telling this story is enough to make me thoroughly enjoy this movie, throw in the incredible soundtrack (I need a vinyl yesterday), the fact that the movie was shot on film, vampires, and Michael B. Jordan gunning down a group of Klansmen with a Tommy gun, and this is, without a shadow of a doubt, the best movie that has released since 2000 at least. In my opinion, it's actually not even close.

There are movies you have to tell your kids about based off of sheer brand recognition, as my mother shared Star Wars with me, I will probably share The Avengers with my kids. However, there are some movies you have a moral obligation to share with the future, and Sinners is of that strain. 

If you've made it to this point, two things:

1) This is probably not even half of what I have to say about this movie but a migraine is drilling the back of my eye right now.

2) I sincerely hope you have seen this already. If you haven't, go watch it. If you have, also go watch it.

With Sinners, Ryan Coogler has cemented himself as the very best new age director, Goransson has cemented himself as arguably the greatest film composer ever, and Michael B. Jordan has finally realized the true potential he was always destined for. Support movies like this, because the way it looks now, we only have a handful of them left.