Hollywood is still battling to bring people back to the cinemas in a marketplace soaked to the skin with at-home streaming content, and one of its early 2025 success stories is Ryan Coogler's latest film Sinners. Shot on a combination of 65mm and IMAX film stock, Sinners is a period vampire film set in the Jim Crow South of the early 1930s. Twin entrepreneurs of sorts Elijah "Smoke" and Elias "Stack" Moore (a charismatic double performance by Michael B. Jordan) return home to Mississippi after a stint in Chicago gangland, with the intention of opening up a "juke joint," a house of live music, drinking and dancing, catered primarily to black clientele. They recruit their cousin Sammie (a very natural Miles Caton), a prodigious blues guitarist, as one of the club's featured talents, as well as a host of friends and acquaintances to work on their staff. The Juke Club's grand opening seems to be a rousing success, but things begin to go very awry when those damn vampires show up.....
***Some spoilers ahead***
Taking partial inspiration from films like From Dusk Till Dawn (another genre-bending vampire film about two brothers trapped in a bar besieged by bloodsuckers), Coogler takes his time building this world and establishing the characters before unleashing the mayhem. Like FDTD this movie could've worked just as well, perhaps even better, without the horror elements, so sharply drawn and compelling are the regular humans and their various relationships. Smoke reconciles with his estranged wife Annie (a stalwart Wunmi Mosaku), a practitioner of Hoodoo (which I think is sort of like voodoo but with benevolent intentions), with whom he had a child who died in infancy. Stack, the more unscrupulous of the brothers, left behind a love interest himself, a multiracial spitfire named Mary (played by a sultry Hailee Steinfeld). Mary is angrily resentful at Stack's abandonment, while Stack has consistently urged her to stay away from him for her own safety, having arranged her marriage to a rich white man. Their young cousin Sammie has a deep passion and natural gift for music but his preacher father thinks the blues are a gateway to evil. Sammie develops an interest in Pearline, a fellow singer who happens to be married but doesn't seem to be a fanatic about it. The principle cast is rounded out by Delroy Lindo as Delta Slim, an aging piano/harmonica player, Omar Miller as Cornbread, a sharecropper whom the twins recruit as a bouncer, and Li Jun Li and Yao as married shop owners Grace and Bo, brought in to tend bar. We really get to know these characters during the film's first half and the performances are all very distinct.
As in FDTD the vampire element is introduced at around the halfway point, but unlike in that film Coogler doesn't just go for simple B-movie schlock (FDTD is a helluva lot of fun to watch despite its second act's lack of substance). Instead the vampires here are almost metaphorical, used to explore deeper thematic subjects like racism, cultural appropriation, and the power of music. It is Sammie's authenticity as a performer that attracts spirits from the past and future, in a visually stunning and inventive mid-film musical number.
The leader of the vamps, a white redneck of Irish descent, doesn't try to entice would-be followers with promises of eternal life so much as eternal harmony and belonging. In a racially divided, inequitable society (where for example black plantation workers are paid in wooden nickels that can only be used at plantation stores), Remmick (played with relish by Jack O'Connell) offers a melting pot where everyone and their cultural experiences is welcomed, contributing to the collective. "I want your stories and I want your songs," he says, "And you're gonna have mine." This vampire community is not unlike the Borg of Star Trek lore, or the body doubles in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. They assimilate but truly believe they're saving their victims.
I have a feeling Sinners is the kind of movie that needs to be viewed multiple times to fully take in. The grand visuals are such a sight to behold I found myself missing little bits of dialogue and character details. Also having the two lead characters played by the same actor occasionally left me unsure which character did and said what. Jordan's appearance as both characters is identical right down to his facial hair pattern, so once their red and blue hats were off it became tougher to tell them apart. As a contrasting example, Jeremy Irons in Dead Ringers played the Mantle twins as very different people, so there was never any question who you were looking at.
There's a lot to unpack from this film and that's not a bad thing. Since viewing it I've found myself thinking about it quite a bit and I'm very keen to give it another look (There's also a post-credits sequence that has me thinking there could be a sequel/spinoff). It's got great characters, compelling performances, picturesque cinematography, and over-the-top, Tarantino-esque carnage. But it also contains thought-provoking social and artistic commentary and a unique twist on tired vampire tropes.
My rating could change on a second viewing but for now I'll give Sinners ***1/2 out of ****.
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