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by anya fielding
Sinners 2025: A feast for music lovers and fun-seekers
Vampire horror delivers exciting romp but falls short of greatness
Sinners proves the triple-threat collaboration between Ryan Coogler, Michael B Jordan and Ludwig Göransson is a winning recipe for success. In Coogler’s latest film, Jordan plays twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, who return to their hometown to open a juke joint.
The twins recruit musicians, including their cousin, Sammie, an aspiring guitarist, who is warned against the dark and seductive powers of music by his father – the local pastor. Youth and passion lead Sammie to ignore him.
But his music turns out to be so appealing, in fact, that it calls out to a supernatural evil, which comes looking for trouble at the juke joint on its opening night.
The film is set over the course of a day, during which Smoke and Stack round up allies – shopkeepers Bo and Grace, Smoke’s estranged wife Annie, pianist Delta Slim, singer Pearline and Stack’s ex-girlfriend Mary – and a night, where they must fight to the death and beyond to survive until dawn.
Putting music at the centre of its premise allows Göransson’s score to shine, mixing blues with contemporary rhythms and instruments to create a vivid and alluring soundtrack which perfectly encapsulates the film’s moody, sultry and thrilling atmosphere.
The horror elements are fairly tame, consisting of a few jump scares and several arterial spurts – which a vampire caper such as this would be remiss to exclude. Its action scenes are well-choreographed and tense enough to entertain for its two-and-a-half-hour run time. The cinematography is lively and the use of colour effective with high-contrast shots and vibrant colours, which are a welcome relief from current cinema’s washed-out, desaturated aesthetic. The cast delivers convincing performances, even when the dialogue veers a bit goofy at times.
Overall, it’s a fun romp, well worth watching, especially in theatres where the soundtrack can be best appreciated, but it falls short of the greatness it could have attained.
Its originality and vision become a double-edged sword as the film strains to include too many ideas at once.
At its core, it is concerned with the Black experience – Black success, culture, resilience, pride and suffering. It aims to do justice to the depth and variety of this experience through its many storylines featuring gangsters, Klansmen, vampires, musicians, Native American vampire-hunters, complicated dynamics between family and intimate partners, religion and the occult – all fighting for screentime. This leaves messages half-formed and over-crowded.
For instance, we get a glimpse of the variety of the Black experience from the point of view of Hailee Steinfeld’s character, Mary, Stack’s white-passing former lover. She arouses suspicion among the Black community at first for her light skin and she is the first to be turned by the vampires at the joint. Was this meant as commentary on the ease with which she can assimilate into white culture? But if so, what does it mean that her admittance into the Black space of the juke joint then ends in catastrophe? Her status is confused and not explored in any meaningful way.
This is also particularly visible with Michael B Jordan’s double role. The twins’ personalities are not significantly differentiated, leading to what feel like unnecessary duplicate scenes when an individual twin interacts with another character, especially a love interest.
Smoke’s confrontation with the Klansmen, an Inglorious-Basterds-style revenge fantasy, feels redundant after the defeat of the vampires. After all, the vampires function as a metaphor for Black suffering, especially during slavery, through their life-draining, rapacious hunger and literal dehumanisation of their victims upon transformation.
