Sinners (2025)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Ryan Coogler's auteurist streak shows no signs of slowing with Sinners, his much-publicized and wildly popular feature film released this past spring. His behind-the-scenes producing and generative brilliance is fascinating, but the specifics are beyond my interest here, so please do yourself a favor and read elsewhere how Coogler has worked to secure the rights to his own creativity, his money, and his integrity. The film itself is more my concern, and as such, I'll not be commenting excessively on its cultural impact, especially in the weeks and months following its release; that said, this is a prime example of how much I'm growing to detest online chatter about art. Yes, Sinners is a singular and masterful work of cinema, and it will prove to be important for both students (of genre, horror, film production and business, American culture, music, etc.) and fans. But the overblown, hyperbolic headlines and "reviews" from average moviegoers has simply got to stop (they're takes, not reviews). Sinners is by no means original in its conceit or storytelling, and I find it laughably disappointing that so many people seem determined to label it with exaggerated and objectively inaccurate laurels. And anyone who tries to introduce or suggest a film to you with anything sounding like "it's the best" or "it's the most" should be immediately questioned about how much they actually know about cinematic history.

And I get it: vampire movies are as old as cinema itself. How original can anything involving vampires really be these days? Lore and rules about the bloodsucking monsters of the night has become so extensive over the past century and a half that new stories concerning them must cherry-pick their own guidelines and boundaries to create a thematically and logically coherent narrative. As such, Sinners mostly fails to make significant impact on the mythic structure it utilizes. The screenplay forces its characters to constantly (in the second half, that is) reify what threats are actively preying upon them and how they might go about vanquishing them. Or at least surviving their onslaught. The sheer number of times freshly-vamped monsters saunter up to doorways and ask to be invited inside is enough to make me roll my eyes, even in repeat viewings. The extraordinary speed with which bitten/mauled characters turn into vampires is bizarrely more akin to action films, and even the film's internal logic about if and how long vampires can endure sunlight falls apart under any scrutiny. And then there's the hive mind exhibited by those who have turned, which demands its own complicated conversation.

Sinners, as a vampire film, owes much to what has come before, and its messy attempts at worldbuilding ring hollow. Conceptually, it seems a mixture of The Color Purple and From Dusk Till Dawn, with strong doses of Night of the Living Dead, Fright Night, and Midnight Mass added. Its plot, designed as a vehicle for horror, is one of the oldest scary stories in the Western world: while celebrating, a group of friends and family are targeted and tormented by monsters without, seeking entry by any means and resorting to existential violence. Setting the story in Jim Crow-era Mississippi allows lots of thematic material, though even this is hardly novel, considering the likes of Lovecraft Country and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, among many literary works by Tananarive Due and others.

But anyone interested in how Sinners operates beyond the realm of the vampire subgenre of horror will find plenty of boons in this fabulous film. Art doesn't need to be wholly original or inventive to be exceptional, and so despite Coogler's mind-boggling choice to so constrain his artistic output with the shackles of vampire lore, this movie is an astonishing piece of filmmaking. Indeed, I'd have much preferred if his story of bootlegging brothers returning to the Delta from success in Chicago, buying a racist's abandoned sawmill, and fixing it up as both a juke joint (for joy) and sanctuary (from Jim Crow) stuck to those elements. Interludes that demonstrate the cultural, historical, and healing powers of music provide tons of potential to this film, notably in a much-discussed single long-take that has me gasping for air each time I witness it. It'll leave you gobsmacked, too, don't fret. And, even in the moments that vampires first start attacking people, one character calls them haints multiple times. My only question, really, after repeat viewings, is why -- oh, why -- didn't Coogler simply stick with that? Eliding the word "vampire" entirely from his screenplay would have freed the film from so much unnecessary baggage and associations and plot holes and generic limitations.

Aside from all that, which is really the only frustration I have with the film (and the way it's been absorbed into social blather), Sinners is pretty amazing, so I won't waste our time with echoing the consensus that its cast is uniformly brilliant -- though I want to say Wunmi Mosaku is perfect and beautiful and highly skilled and needs to be in my eyeballs more often -- and that Michael B. Jordan is a force of nature onscreen. As an introduction to Miles Caton, Sammie is the kind of character every actor wants but only powerhouse performers can embody; Caton deserves accolades for what he gives to this picture. 

Coogler's direction, Autumn Durald Arkapaw's cinematography, Ludwig Goransson's score (and the soundtrack), the editing, the costumes, the effects: it's all detailed and carefully constructed, meaning that great care was clearly applied to its production. If only every film was crafted with a fraction of this level of thoughtfulness and specificity. Questions can be raised, for sure -- I wondered aloud, in my most recent viewing, why it's shot on spectacular 65mm with IMAX cameras when so many shots have only shallow focus and severe close-ups, to which my viewing friend shushed me -- and I rather wish more consideration had been granted in the screenplay to the unbounded potential of Sammie's musicianship that transcends time and place. While it can be a hard film to describe without its obvious referents, and even as a narrative (after all, is it Sammie's story, or Smoke and Stack's?), its first hour, its turning point, and its denouement together make Sinners one of the richest, bravest, and most compelling films of the year so far. If only Coogler had avoided naming his antagonists as vampires.