Movie Review: Sinners (2025)

Sinners (2025) written and directed by Ryan Coogler

Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return from Gangland Chicago to their home town in 1932 Mississippi. They've got a pile of money, Irish beer, and Italian wine. They plan to open a juke joint. They purchase an abandoned mill from some redneck who claims there is no Klan in the area. The twins go their separate ways for the day, one collecting a bunch of blues musicians to play at the joint, the other to get the food and staff. Their star musician is Sammie (Miles Canton), their cousin who is son of a local preacher who does not want his son getting involved with blues music. The day goes by with a lot of character revelations as the twins prepare for opening night.

One seeming incidental revelation is the arrival of Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O'Connell) who turns a local redneck couple. The trio show up that night at the juke joint asking to be let in so they can perform music too. They aren't let in but they do have money to spend, unlike many of the local black people who can only pay with company scrip, not dollars and cents. The vampires get a leg up when Stack's ex-girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) comes out to try and coax them back. She gets turned, goes back into juke joint, and starts spreading trouble.

The movie is an interesting blend of music admiration, historical commentary, and action/horror mayhem. The first scenes show how music brings people together and can invoke spirits past and present. This is shown when Sammie plays at the joint and musicians from all walks of history join in, from tribal Africa to rappers. The sequence is amazing and beautiful, a huge contrast to the ugliness and violence elsewhere in the movie. The brothers confront a lot of limitations as they execute their plan, and not just from racist white people. The vampire lore is fairly standard with none of the Christian elements used (holy water, crosses, Eucharist). In fact, there's some suggestion that religion is a tool of oppression but that assertion flies by pretty quickly in the midst of the vampire assault on the juke joint. Music is the substitute for religion here; it's a path to transcendence and unity with others, even others that came before and will come after. That idea also gets buried under the carnage of the final two set-pieces. So deeper themes run through the narrative but sometimes they run out.

I found a lot of things to like about the film. The visuals are gorgeous and the music is great. The performances are solid. On the other hand, it's thematically slippery and uneven, for example throwing in a lot of other minorities (the vampire is fleeing Native American vampire hunters who take their cameo and go; the twins buy a lot of stuff from the local Chinese grocery couple who wind up at the juke joint, so much more than a cameo) seemingly for the sake of representation rather than authenticity. At the very least, the movie gives viewers a lot to think about, even if it hasn't thought out everything.

Recommended.