Sinners Review (Film, 2025)

content warning: blood, gore, foul language, violence against women, racial violence, racism, smoking, alcohol use, sexual content

Ryan Coogler might be the most important American filmmaker working today. His expertise in filmmaking is elevated to new heights by his use of genre filmmaking tropes to critique institutional racism. From the found footage crime thriller Fruitvale Station to the sci-fi heights of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Coogler is not afraid to confront real world issues of racism regardless of the expectations of the genre in more mainstream cinema. The result is an ever-growing track record of hit films with audiences and critics quickly recognizing a new auteur of cinema forging his own path in Hollywood.

Sinners is no exception. Set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, Sinners explores the diaspora of different races interacting in a sharecropper community through the lens of vampire folklore. It's a bold swing that allows Coogler to employ historical facts, tropes of the Southern Gothic, and well-known rules of the vampire genre to explore religion, race, and equality.

Preacherboy is the son of the town preacher, a young man more interested in performing with his guitar than following the strict rules of Christianity his father commands him to. Smoke and Stack are returning sons of the community, gangsters who recently left Chicago with all their wealth to set up a juke joint in their hometown. Everyone knows Smoke and Stack, for better or worse, and they're family. The husband/wife team of Bo and Lisa Chow, Chinese American grocery store owners, teeter the line between black and white society by running separate but equal grocery stores across the street from each other. Annie, a Hoodoo practitioner and sharecropper store owner, was in a relationship with Smoke, while Mary, a white-passing mixed race black woman, was in a relationship with Stack. All these characters and many more are going to mix and mingle at the opening night of the new juke joint.

This alone is enough plot to create a compelling story. Coogler pushes it further from the opening moments of the film. The narration explains that cultures all over the world believe that talented musicians can open the veil between time and space to produce truly transcendent experiences. These moments can bring out the best in society, but also attract evil, as well. It's a fantastic gambit setting up the expectations for otherworldly forces to weave their way into a story about a juke joint in ways you might never imagine.

The absolutely highlight of the film is when we see Preacherboy fulfill his potential and create one of these moments on opening night. He's not the only musician to bend the rules of space and time, but he is shown to be the most powerful in the story. In an earlier scene, we see Annie sing a protection spell that begins to distort the frame and twist the clarity of sound waves. In another, we see blues pianist Delta Slim draw a crowd at the train station with nothing but a harmonica; he hears one riff from Preacherboy and warns him not to waste his gift there. Pearline, a former singer turned housewife, also gets her moment to call upon this force later on when the party is in full force.

And then there's our merry band of singing vampires. Their leader is Remmick, an Irishman older than anyone could imagine, leaning into another element of privilege in society. When Remmick first meets the crew at the juke joint, they ask if he's a Klansman, which offends him more than anything else they could say. Remmick existed before the modern concepts of race, and truly believes in his own version of equality.

He sings a folk-style tune with a banjo, accompanied by two new converts singing in harmony, oblivious to the song's actual meaning to the African American community. The song is a darkly comedic blues tune about taking a man for all he's worth in a game of cards. This becomes oddly sinister as this trio of outsiders sings about "[picking] poor Robin clean." A room full of musicians would recognize Geeshie Wiley's song as a recent release, but Remmick, who absorbs knowledge as he changes more followers to vampires, wouldn't necessary understand the context that produces unease with white people cheerily singing that song for a captive black audience.

Sinners leans into vampire rules you probably know. Sunlight is dangerous--Remmick is running for his life at sunset when we first meet him, smoking and burning with every step. So is garlic--it burns like holy water. A lesser used rule in modern vampire media is the crux of the film. Vampires cannot enter a location unless they are invited in. This becomes a litmus test for who is or is not turned as the story progresses and Remmick's army grows. The people in the community might as well be family; why would they need an invite to come inside?

My analysis here barely scratches the surface of one of the best vampire films to come around in years. It also feels oddly minimizing to label this as a vampire film. This is Coogler's strongest, riskiest film yet, one that will likely be studied for decades for its exploration of race, privilege, music, folklore, religion, and society. I could talk for hours just about the use of music, or vampirism, or historical context of this particular place and time, or the symbolic nature of each major character in relation to the notion of Sinners; the less I say, the better. This is a cinematic event I encourage anyone who can handle a little blood and gore to experience in theaters.

Sinners is playing in theaters.