Some movies play better when you go in knowing nothing about them. Having missed the hype around Sinners, a $90 million passion project from Ryan Coogler (Creed, Black Panther), I was expecting an arty period piece with horror elements. But I wasn’t prepared for the sheer scope of the movie or the way it cuts across genres, defying categorization.
The deal
In 1932 Mississippi, preacher’s son Sammie (Miles Caton) stumbles into Sunday service clutching the broken neck of a guitar, bloody visions flashing before his eyes.
We travel back 24 hours to find out how young Sammie, a promising blues musician, came to this pass. It all starts when his cousins, twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), return home after years of absence. Flush with cash from bootlegging in Chicago for Al Capone, the brothers buy an old sawmill and outfit it as a juke joint. Tonight is the grand opening, and Sammie will sing and play his guitar, accompanied by an alcoholic vagrant (Delroy Lindo) who’s also a fiercely talented pianist.
But Sammie’s father warns him that blues music attracts evil, and he’s not all wrong. Not far away, supernatural danger stalks the cotton fields in the form of a young Irishman (Jack O’Connell) with a disarming smile and a knack for exploiting preexisting hatreds to his own ends. When he hears the music coming from Smoke and Stack’s joint, he recognizes cultural capital — and wants in.
Will you like it?
Sinners opens with a voice-over evoking the myths of many cultures in which musicians are uncanny figures whose talent might summon good or evil spirits alike. Think Orpheus — or, given the film’s Mississippi Delta setting, think the legends surrounding bluesman Robert Johnson, said to have sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads.
Sinners lacks the moralistic framework that undergirds such Faustian bargain stories, however. Smoke and Stack provoke whispers when they return home — they’re outlaws, rumored to have killed their father — but Coogler’s script doesn’t present them as evil or their juke joint as a place of temptation for the more innocent Sammie.
On the contrary, the first third of the movie makes us the brothers’ coconspirators, following their prep for the big night in the kind of detail usually reserved for heist flicks. As they enlist a pianist, a cook, suppliers and a bouncer, we’re immersed in a cross-section of their community.
While most Vermonters won’t be able to experience the film as it was shot (partially in IMAX), the wide compositions of director of photography Autumn Durald Arkapaw evoke the golden age of the big screen. A masterful one-shot takes us through a small town where Black sharecroppers make common cause with Chinese immigrants who run separate shops for Black and white patrons.
We hear folksy banter and ominous stories of Jim Crow. Each brother left a woman behind when he went north, and each of those women has her own story. Annie (an electrifying Wunmi Mosaku) counters the Christian understanding of good and evil with her hoodoo spirituality, while the fiery Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) was raised with the twins but now passes for white.
The movie’s first half reminded me of David Milch’s “Deadwood” — and its more distant inspiration, Shakespeare — in the intensity and economy with which Coogler brings to life a world of characters, each equipped with backstory and motivation. Until twilight falls on the Delta, the supernatural remains safely at the margins of the story. But then the juke joint starts pumping, and all hell breaks loose.
In its second half, Coogler’s naturalistic period piece makes a genre lurch reminiscent of 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn, donning bloody fangs and transforming into a grind-house action flick. The bridge between its two modes is Sammie singing the blues, an intoxicatingly surreal sequence in which disparate eras and musical genres manifest in the juke joint as a single living tapestry of talent, aided by Ludwig Göransson’s score. No wonder that a supernatural interloper is eager to appropriate Sammie’s gift, promising cultural fusion but delivering mayhem instead.
If you expect something austere and auteurish from Sinners, you’ll be surprised to find it has all the thrills of a good popcorn movie. But its implications are more daring and expansive. In this film’s moral universe, supernatural evil flows from mundane human cruelty instead of the other way around, women hold up half the sky, and artists don’t have to sell their souls for talent.
Amid recent industry chatter about the poor performance of original (i.e., non-franchise) movies, the success of Sinners offers a sign of hope. Be sure to stay for the mid-credits coda — it’s essentially the ending, and it would be a sin to miss it.
MARGOT HARRISON
If you like this, try…
Fruitvale Station (2013; Cinemax, Kanopy, YouTube Primetime, rentable): Coogler’s partnership with Jordan goes back to the former’s breakout film, based on the true story of a young Bay Area father shot by police.
“Lovecraft Country” (10 episodes, 2020; Max, rentable): Some viewers of Sinners have compared it to this Southern gothic horror series in which a young Black man seeks his missing father on a road trip through the segregated America of the 1950s.
Nope (2022; Kanopy, rentable): Jordan Peele followed his hits Get Out and Us with this high-concept, high-budget alien horror film that subverts traditional expectations about Westerns. While it lacks the strong characterizations of Sinners (in my view), it’s an ambitious and visually stunning genre mashup.
This article appears in Apr 23-29, 2025.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
