Sinners: a bracingly original African American epic

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners was spring 2025’s great cinematic surprise: a highly-anticipated film that became an instant cultural phenomenon. For a while after the film’s release, it seemed that every other person you encountered, online or off, wanted to discuss it. Did you expect vampires? Was the film progressive or reactionary as an allegory for race relations? Were there too many endings? How about that cosmic, time-leaping musical mid-section? Could there be a sequel? And could any actor look more stylish than Michael B. Jordan in those matching three-piece suits?  

It’s rare, these days, for such a complex and idiosyncratic mainstream film to make it to the screen, and then to become so prominent a part of mainstream cultural conversation. Sinners’ shift from lovingly detailed community portrait to full-on blood-soaked genre exercise unsettled some, but the greatness of the film lies precisely in its bold combination of elements. A period horror musical shot through with historical awareness, soul-stirring songs, horny wit and sincere emotion, Sinners found Coogler temporarily putting the Black Panther franchise on hold, moving beyond Marvel to craft a bracingly original African American epic.  

In their fifth collaboration, the writer-director casts Jordan in dual roles as The Smokestack Twins, Elijah and Elias Moore, WWI veterans whom we meet on their return to Mississippi in 1932 after a seven-year stint in the employ of Chicago gangsters. The twins’ travels have essentially been a search for freedom. But having discovered that Chicago is just “Mississippi with tall buildings instead of plantations,” their new idea is to open a juke joint back in their hometown: “we might as well deal with the devil we know.”  

What the brothers don’t know, yet, is that the devils dwelling down South also include an ever-expanding coven of vampires, led by Jack O’Connell’s Remmick. With a keen line in folk song, Remmick and his fellow bloodsuckers are drawn by the blues music of the twins’ cousin Sammie: a sound so transcendent it can, as film’s voiceover tells us, “pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future.” 

The startling set-piece that dramatises Sammie’s unearthly skill was instantly recognised for what it was: visionary. Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s camera sweeps through the club as musicians of varied traditions and time periods appear among our protagonists. The sequence splits open the structure of Sinners, transforming the film from John Sayles-styled social panorama to visceral horror. 

Coogler cited The Twilight Zone episode The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank (1962) and Stephen King’s book Salem’s Lot (1974) as inspirations. But what most distinguishes Sinners is its vivid evocation of the Jim Crow-era South, populated by richly imagined characters. For all Jordan’s doubled flair, the entire cast makes an impact, from Wunmi Mosaku’s wise, striking presence as Annie – the character closest to African spirituality, whose narration ushers the viewer into the film – to Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim, the haunted, hard-drinking pianist employed at the juke. And, in a star-making screen debut, deep-voiced Miles Caton is the film’s enduring emotional linchpin as Sammie, the guitar prodigy whose passion for secular music has created conflict with his pastor father. 

Some commentators were quick to see Sinners in the terms outlined by NPR journalist Tonya Mosley, viewing the vampires as “metaphors… for systems that feed on Black life.” But, for a film so deeply concerned with duality that it features twins as protagonists, such a reading only gets you so far. A migrant marked by Ireland’s colonisation, O’Connell’s Remmick is a compelling antagonist because of the connection he perceives between Black and Irish experiences; his proposal to Sammie – “I want your stories and I want your songs, and you’re gonna have mine” – suggests exchange as much as appropriation. In Remmick’s vision, vampirism signifies fellowship – an overcoming of loss and trauma – among those groups that the dominant culture seeks to exploit or destroy.  

For all its thorny, unresolved resonances, it should be noted that Sinners is also terrific entertainment: a heady ride that uses the medium to the full, from Ludwig Göransson’s protean score, now gently twanging, now surging with choral threat, to Hannah Beachler’s rich production design. For Coogler, the project originated from a personal place in family history, memories of an uncle from Mississippi who introduced him to blues music. Drawing on the past, looking to the future, Sinners stands as a new American film for the ages. 

► Sinners is available to stream now.