Ryan Coogler’s period set Southern Gothic vampire film transcends the label of elevated horror to deliver one of 2025’s best films of the year.
Going into Sinners, the latest film from writer/director Ryan Googler, you might think from the film’s marketing you were just getting something along the lines of From Dusk ‘Til Dawn, a grindhouse-style gritty vampire film borne out of a gangster drama. But that’s just a knee-jerk reaction that dissipates until you sit down to watch the film, which hits theaters this weekend April 18th. What Coogler and the rich ensemble cast and creatives he has drawn here have crafted an amazing epic drawing on the history of the diaspora of minorities living the Jim Crow South in 1930’s Mississippi and the rich history of their combined culture, music and influence enriched with the mythology of hoodoo and vampires. Sinners is every much of an epic expanding across time and space as Dune or Mad Max and the character depth and world building here is something that needs to be seen in a theater.
Coogler introduces us early to our seeming protagonists, a pair of twins named Smock and Stack (played with aplomb by Michael B. Jordan, continuing his rich series of collaborations with Coogler). Both are coming back to Mississippi after serving as enforcers for Al Capone during Prohibition, rich with Italian wine and Irish beer supplies they’ve gotten from playing gangsters off each other in Chicago. Their plan; to start up a juke joint and make some real money off those ill-gotten goods. Jordan is amazing in this dual role; embodying both characters with unique backstories, motivations and regrets. Smoke wants to make good for his past mistakes. He has regret in the loss of his child with Annie, a hoodoo healer played by Lovecraft Country’s Wunmi Mosaku in a bravura performance and the relationship the two lost in the wake of the death of the baby feels real and palpable. Stack is a hustler, one with a dark past where he left his beloved Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) his mixed-race but passing ex-lover who waited for him after he left for Chicago, but who he felt he could never make safe. Stack sees a future in his cousin Preacher Boy Sammy (played by newcomer Miles Canton) a musical prodigy balancing a difficult relationship with his love for music and the love of his God-fearing preacher father. The trio draft several lively characters into their juke-joint ensemble, including a standout Delroy Lindo as a world weary blues harmonica player named Delta Slim who lends the film an air of gravitas and history in his delivery and circumstances.
But as Smoke, Stack and Sammy try to make hay while the sun shines, as the sun sets we’re introduced to Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish scoundrel being hunted by a pack of trackers from the Choctaw Indian Tribe. As Remmick begs for an invite from Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke), a Klan connected couple, from the Indians; the audience realizes what the couple hasn’t. That invite isn’t a respite, it’s a dinner invite – Remmick is a vampire and the Indians are hunting him as he was preying on their lands. Remmick turns the couple and the new family slowly make their way to Smock and Stack’s Juke as the moon rises on their new lives as a pack of undead connected through Remmick.
If the film’s development stopped here, this would just be an excellent genre movie. But Coogler really lets his teeth sink into the marrow of exploring these character’s lives and motivations for why they need this escape; both of the juke and later from these vampiric beasts. As Smoke and Stack’s juke draws a big crowd, it doesn’t draw cash, but credit from the plantations where these sharecroppers live and work under indentured servitude and the twins see their dreams for making money, real money, from this venture, vanish. As Mary hates the pain Stack brought her, she still wants to earn her keep when she sees Remmick and his people, who aren’t invited into the juke, have real money and maybe she can get it from them. Sammy struggles to find acceptance as a blues man because of his age and inexperience, but his talent is undeniable and can literally transport people through time through the power of his emotions and power behind the guitar. The way that Coogler portrays this on screen is amazing and to be experience, it channels the unique anachronistic way that Lovecraft Country made its period music seem relatable to people who might not be fans of the blues by threading the needle to what lead to the blues and what came after it in a pure spectacle for the eyes and ears. Even Remmick and his people are an example of the literal outsider; seen as monsters which they are, but as Irish settlers, they were also considered the same social standing as the sharecroppers they shared lands with; not real white people, and Remmick uses this in his seduction of would-be members of his tribe. O’Connell does a lot with this role; one which could’ve been paper-thin but his charisma and personality make you wonder what is so bad about what he’s offering and that’s a credit to his performance.
The less you know about Sinners, the richer it is. It reminds me of many ways of Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, a 1995 horror film directed by long-time Spike Lee collaborator Ernest Dickerson. Both tales on their surface could be dismissed as pulp, but the background which informs them makes the film so much richer. Sinner transcends that further by serving generational trauma as the genesis of connection and the ability of those connections to create art, blues, to transcend that pain and make it joy that is truly immortal. Don’t miss Sinners in theaters.
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SINNERS (2025)
**** AND /* OF 5
Coogler makes a film that transcends being a genre piece but uses that as a vehicle to explore so much more and craft a new American epic.
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VIDEO REVIEW