2025 | rated R | starring Michael B. Jordon, Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku | written & directed by Ryan Coogler | 2 hr 17 mins | 3 1/2 out of 5 stars |
2025 Halloween Horrorfest #2
In 1932 Mississippi, two twin brothers, Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordon) return to town to open a new blues club, Juke Joint, in town recruiting their talented guitar-player cousin Sammy (Miles Caton) to be one of the performers. During the opening night the transcendent music attracts a group of vampires lead by Remmick (Jack O’Connell) who attempt to cajole their way into the club, forcing the brothers and everyone they talked into helping them to fight for their lives until sun up.
An original film from Ryan Coogler and a rare piece of work in 2025, Sinners has all of the charms, wonders and flaws of a passion project. It’s overly long and indulgent, it’s awkwardly paced, primarily in the first act, and ultimately uses it’s setting, identity and atmosphere to breathe life into an otherwise fairly formulaic vampire movie. Coogler has a lot of big ideas here, sometimes they are cleverly woven together and sometimes jammed together to make things fit come hell or high water, but they are there.
The first act of Sinners is what another movie would edit into a get-the-band-back-together montage. Instead, Coogler details Smoke and Stack meeting each character and asking them to help with the club, it’s a lot of table-setting, but it’s also effective at immersing us in the movie’s period world building. Sinners puts us in 1932 Mississippi, the streets, the shops, the neighboring homes and swamps. In a time when other movies feel like they were shot on a green screen, Coogler’s film feels like it lives and breathes in a real place. The film is visually gorgeous. Coogler does a lot of painting with color and light here, playing with aspect ratios and getting creative shots out of the single location Juke Joint that makes up the 2nd half of the film. There is a masterful scene here where Coogler conveys the transcendent quality of blues music and how it doesn’t just thin the vail of the living and the dead, but time and space, that people will be talking about long after the movie. It’s the scene of the movie. When the movie turns over to it’s not-so-scary horror elements, I wished it was this idea that he was fleshing out more.
But like a Marvel movie that has to serve as a backdoor introduction to another character (Coogler is no stranger to that mandate with Black Panther: Wakanda Forever), Sinners has the business of vampire genre work to attend to and that’s when the movie gets the most fun and least interesting. Fun, because its fun watching the characters Coogler has set up navigate this new outrageous situation, particularly Hoodoo practitioner Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) who informs everyone of the vampire rules and catches on quick when characters start suddenly asking for a verbal invite into the club. And double particularly for Smoke and Stack, who Jordan gives two distinctly different characters in dual role and then pits them on opposite sides of the conflict.
Least interesting, because Coogler pretty much sets the movie on autopilot from there as far as the vampires go, without doing much new or inventive with the genre or characters. Here they’re Irish, so we get another historically oppressed American group go after another, they’re not racist like the klan, that lurks around the edges of the story, but the tension is there. I love the moments when Coogler breaks away from this genre and isn’t afraid to be weird such as when the vampires break out into an Irish Riverdance for their own musical number. Those moments are sparing however and unfortunately take a back seat as the movie goes into action move. It’s From Dusk ‘Til Dawn but not as trashy or mean-spirited, when I’d prefer the more creative stuff be fleshed out in the third act. Maybe we see more of music coming back to pierce the veil and distort time to save the day. Maybe it turns into a full-blown musical.
The action in the movie is solid, because Coogler knows how to stage an action scene, but this is a movie about music and its power through time, not fighting vampires, as much as vampires are also timeless and can ride alongside that music through the eras. Pacing becomes an issue again in the final moments when Coogler ends the movie multiple times, jumping back and forth between the credits and flashforwards and real-life dedications.
Those are technical things we can debate about. Sinners is a rare singular vision from its filmmaker, like Damien Leone’s Terrifier 2, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon or the Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All At Once it throws everything and the kitchen sink into it, unsure if another opportunity like this will come its way. Like those movies, it is long and messy, but it is also admirable and beautiful and definitely worth seeing.