There’s something ancient in the bones of Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s staggering new horror film, something as old as the cotton fields stretching endlessly across Mississippi, and as urgent as the music that erupts from its juke joints like a cry for salvation. Set in 1932, yet filmed with the cinematic scope and precision of a myth being freshly minted, Sinners feels like the kind of movie we rarely get anymore: original, ambitious, and deeply, feverishly alive.
Michael B. Jordan stars in dual roles as Smoke and Stack, twin brothers returning to their hometown of Clarksdale after years of war, organized crime, and hard-earned disillusionment. They’re not back for redemption, they’re here to start something. A juke joint. A new chapter. Maybe a sanctuary. But this is Mississippi under Jim Crow, and sanctuary is a dangerous illusion.
The first hour of Sinners is a masterclass in patient, soulful storytelling. It’s a blues-soaked drama built on slow-burning grief and impossible dreams. Jordan, in what may be his finest performance(s) to date, gives Smoke and Stack distinct physicalities, rhythms, and wounds. One is reserved, the other a showboat. Both are haunted. And into their orbit comes young Sammie (a breakout Miles Caton), a guitar prodigy and preacher’s son whose music might just be holy enough to raise the dead, or damn the living.
When the horror hits, it lands like a bullet to the chest. Jack O’Connell’s vampiric Remmick and his pale, smiling entourage knock on the juke joint door like missionaries bearing plague. But Coogler, as he’s always done, refuses to play in binaries. Like every good monster, his are metaphors. For colonialism, for assimilation, for whiteness that pretends to offer refuge while erasing everything in its path. And yet the scariest thing about them isn’t their fangs, it’s how seductive they are. They promise safety. Unity. A future. All it’ll cost you is your soul.
The genius of Sinners lies in how it transcends its genre roots without ever betraying them. Coogler crafts action sequences as elegant as anything in Creed, then lets Delroy Lindo and Wunmi Mosaku break your heart in quiet scenes about grief and second chances. Ludwig Göransson’s score, a fusion of gospel, blues, and jazz, isn’t just accompaniment, it’s the film’s lifeblood. In one rapturous sequence, Sammie’s playing literally bends time, conjuring visions of griots, hip-hop MCs, and turntablists in a swirling communion of Black musical history. It’s breathtaking. It’s probably the best scene I’ve ever seen in any film, in my entire life. I was speechless.
That is what the film is about. Remmick wants to be connected to his past and future and the only way he sees to do that is taking from the people of color who have that ability. For all his power and bravado, he cannot muster spirits with his music. This happens every day. White people are consistently taking and putting on POC culture as a costume trying to use the spirits to lap up some cultural currency. That’s not how it works. Remmick learns that the hard way. He talks about his own people being “colonized” by Christianity and he comes looking for a pathway back to his roots but goes about it wrong.
There’s nothing ironic about Sinners. It’s sincere in its politics, its horror, its yearning. Coogler shoots on 65mm with Autumn Durald Arkapaw, capturing misty cotton fields and fire-lit faces with a grandeur that makes every frame feel eternal. The film breathes. It broods. And when it bares its teeth, it does so with righteous fury.
Yes, there are elements that verge on the operatic. Yes, there’s a post-credits scene. But Sinners earns every heightened beat. It’s pulp and poetry. It’s From Dusk Till Dawn rewritten by August Wilson. It’s the rare film that weaponizes genre to illuminate history, while still thrilling the hell out of you.
This is the kind of movie that reminds you what cinema can do. And what horror, in the right hands, has always done best: Tell us the truth. Coogler is trying to tell us that the only actual way out of the hatred of SUPPRESSION is CREATION. Make music, make art. Make the spirits come alive.
