by Miguel E. Rodriguez
DIRECTOR: Ryan Coogler
CAST: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, Jack O’Connell
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 98% Certified Fresh
PLOT: Trying to leave their troubled lives behind, twin brothers return to their hometown to start again, only to discover that even greater troubles are waiting to welcome them back home.
“You keep dancin’ with the devil…one day he’s gonna follow you home.” – Jedidiah in Sinners
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners pulls one of the best head-fakes I’ve seen in a long time. The initial trailers would have had you believe the film was basically a character study (albeit an intense one) of identical twin brothers trying to run an illegal business in 1932 Mississippi. Since both brothers are being played by the excellent Michael B. Jordan, aided by a stellar supporting cast, I got the impression it would be a hybrid of Heat, The Cotton Club, and Michael Mann’s Public Enemies.
Sinners does cover much of that fertile ground…for its first half. Read no further if you’ve been lucky enough not to have seen what the main attraction is, plot-wise, for the film.
We first get a prologue depicting a bloodied young black man bursting into a Sunday church service while holding the top half of a broken guitar neck. This is Sammie Moore, played by Miles Caton in his film debut. The rest of the film is a flashback to the previous day.
The Smokestack brothers have returned home. Smoke and Stack are identical twins, although one of them (Smoke, I think?) has some visible gold in his smile, so that helps distinguish them from each other. They are both sharply dressed, having returned from Chicago after working for Al Capone for a spell. They plan to open a juke joint in a building they purchased from a smarmy character named Hogwood, a white man who grins and assures them they won’t have any trouble from the Klan ‘round here.
This whole first half of the movie is masterfully told. We are presented with fully drawn characters, not generic placeholders to be shuffled randomly later on. We find out that Sammie is cousin to Smoke and Stack. We meet Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a mixed-race woman who was left high and dry romantically when Smoke left for Chicago. There’s Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), a nearly-ancient man who plays a mean blues harmonica, whom the brothers want to hire to play in their new joint. There are the Asian owners of a grocery store, hired to cater their grand opening.
And then there’s actress Wunmi Mosaku, who gives a luminous, heartbreaking performance as Annie, a woman who bore Smoke a child that died as an infant. One of the highlights of the film shows Smoke reconnecting with Annie in a scene that at first invites some crude jokes, but which later provides a deep emotional resonance in the movie’s closing passages. I only remember Mosaku as a sizable presence in the one-and-done HBO series Lovecraft Country (2020), but she was also apparently in Deadpool and Wolverine (2024), so now I gotta go back and watch THAT again. Twist my arm.
The movie plays more like a really good Stephen King novel than any other movie I can think of since Pan’s Labyrinth (2006). The film’s canvas is painted beautifully and crisply, moving smartly without rushing. I would hope Sinners gets nominated for its film editing (provided by Michael P. Shawver), not because of the thrilling later sections, but because of how economically the first half of the film provides us with the perfect amount of information to understand everyone’s motivations when the second half arrives, when all hell breaks loose.
I must also mention the film’s, I guess, “mystical” content when it comes to African American history. Early on, Annie, who is a “hoodoo” practitioner (I don’t think “witch” is the right word here), tells a lovely story about how, every once in a while, a musician comes along who can play so beautifully that their music “pierces the veil” between past, present, and future, inviting the spirits of all three to come together and enjoy the music as one. There is a magnificent sequence where we get a visual representation of exactly that when Sammie starts to play the blues in the juke joint. Trying to describe it in print is a fool’s errand, but it is one of the film’s many visual highlights. Trust me. You’ll know it when you see it. It’s as elegant a representation of Black history as I’ve ever seen, and I don’t know how anyone will be able to top it in the future.
All of that, though, is just prologue for the main event: the vampires. If you’ve read this long and didn’t know that was coming, I’m sorry I spoiled that for you, but you were warned.
The whole second half of Sinners flirts with becoming a straight-up genre picture, which is not a bad thing in itself, but which would have been almost disappointing when stacked against what came before. However, because we have been given such a thorough grounding in all the characters beforehand, there are real stakes involved in trying to predict who will live and who will die. Some deaths are almost foregone conclusions, but even those are more affecting than they would have been in other similar films.
Traditional vampire lore is very much at play, especially the bit about having to be invited into a house. But the filmmakers did add one new bit, which I thought was EXTREMELY effective. As a vampire is about to feed (or thinks it’s about to), it begins to drool…a thick, gooey saliva that drips from its mouth like ectoplasm. This is a cool touch, and it makes perfect sense, a Pavlovian response to an imminent meal. Don’t be surprised if another vampire film in the future steals that from Sinners. I’d steal it. Wouldn’t think twice about it.
Sinners undoubtedly has some deeper meanings that I am not qualified to unpack, and I leave it to you to find them. This is one of the best films I’ve seen this year, and it is deservedly making bank at the box office. (Over $200 million globally as of May 3rd, 2025.) It is surprising, it is dramatic, it is thrilling, and it is worth seeing on the big screen. Trust me.
2 UNPAID MOVIE CRITICS!!!! 