Sinners
Written and directed by Ryan Coogler
Produced by Proximity Media, distributed by Warner Bros
Theatrical release April 17, 2025
It would be considered rather late in the day to call a new theatrical horror film one of the genre’s all-time greatest, but your dedicated correspondent has no problem saying that about Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, a stylish and audacious film that blends the supernatural with a serious but lively treatment of the Black experience in America, filtered through music. I am serious: This is as far from the throwaway invocation of a horror trope, the threatening teenager, as a horror film can be.
Let us leap over description of the premise to examine one of its most stunning set pieces. It is 1932. Sammie (Miles Caton), a young Black son of a preacher man, plays his blues guitar to a packed juke joint just opening that very night, and everybody hits the floor in rollicking and sensual celebration. The camera swoops around the floor, freed of all constraints by the music, and it gradually becomes clear that the sheer magic of the performance has manifested as a slipstream miracle that the celebrants can surely feel but that we the audience are privileged to see, because the partners suddenly include dancers from throughout Black History, from African days to the neon fantasies of the near future. The movie includes among its premises the idea that the blues can summon magic, both blessed and dark, and this phenomenon is one of the blessed, a means of fusing the present, past, and future via memory and tradition. The scene is one of the great set pieces of all time, itself worth the price of admission—but the dark half is still coming.
Sammie is a key viewpoint character, but he is joined by two snazzily dressed, identical men, his long-long twin uncles, who bear the nicknames Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan). As doppelgangers of one another, played by the same performer, they invite confusion, especially in the early going. More important is the manner in which, to their past associates in a Mississippi delta town, they seem like ghosts from the past; very much alive, they have nevertheless been gone for a long time, having led a violent past in the Great War, and later, in the Chicago mobs (name-dropping someone they worked for, Al Capone). Each of them has a woman they left behind. Smoke’s is Annie, local purveyor of supernatural goods (Wunmi Mosaku), Stack’s is Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), now passing as white and trapped in a loveless marriage. (Steinfeld is one of the film’s most valuable players.) Both show up at the juke joint for opening night, and for a long time, we follow these characters’ dramas, listen to the music, and observe the results of the era’s racial injustice, which include sharecroppers who can barely pay their tabs because the plantation owners pay them in wooden nickels and other scrip, a means of preventing them from taking any savings they have and moving on to better employment.
More than half the film proceeds along this path, and could have ended this way, for all this viewer care. The music is spectacular, the craft is flawless, the dialogue both poetic and frequently hilarious. Smoke and Stack are both impressively violent men, financing their enterprise with stolen cash, shooting two local idiots who try to rob them—but they are hoping to grab something better, especially with their headliner, the alcoholic bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo, whom these eyes haven’t seen in far too long). But a supernatural menace, coming in the form of a deeply familiar trope, is about to turn the evening into a bloodbath.
Look. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino made a film that this one follows in some ways. You know it. It was called From Dusk to Dawn, and for its first half it was a drama about a preacher, father of two, played by Harvey Keitel, whose faith is tested when the family is hijacked by a pair of vicious bank robbers. They hit the road, and for about half the film’s length it is a slow-burn suspense film based on redemption and faith. Then they discover that they are surrounded by vampires. The tone shift is startling and it is instant. This is what this film does. For half the journey it is a deliberate mosaic of character that includes blues music, and then it is all-out splatter horror. The difference is that it is much more intent than the Rodriguez / Tarantino film in paying off the themes that it introduced. From Dusk to Dawn does some of that, but mostly it’s mayhem, okay? This one certainly has the mayhem, and it certainly pulls off the same trick, but this is still a world where these Black men and women struggle to carve out a life in the oppressive shadow of a white world, from which they are so separated that until the horror begins, the whites are almost entirely off-screen. (Until then, the primary specimen is a guy who claims he’s not in the Klan.) And then a trio of the paler persuasion show up at the door, asking to be let in. Our protagonists suspect that they are trouble, and in this they are oh so right. But they certainly underestimate the kind it is. For a while, Annie calls them “haints.” But this is not what they are. What they are is something familiar, something often played for laughs, but still capable of being very, very scary.
