Something a little different this week: a recommendation that you take movie night to the movie theater. Sometimes a film doesn’t just play with genre—it slips beneath it, like blood under floorboards. Sinners (2025), Ryan Coogler’s latest and strangest film, is a Southern Gothic horror, a resurrection drama, a racial reckoning, and a ghost story, all braided into one feverish depiction of 1930s Mississippi. If Creed was about rising from the ashes and Black Panther about what we inherit, Sinners is about what refuses to stay buried. There’s a lot to say about Sinners, but it’s a movie that’s best experienced cold: go watch it on the biggest screen possible with as little knowledge of the movie as possible. I had the good fortune to see it on IMAX. It was stunning.
Michael B. Jordan plays twin brothers—Stack and Smoke—in a dual performance that’s both technically impressive and emotionally raw. They’ve returned to the Mississippi town of their youth to start a juke joint: a club just outside of town for the local Black community to gather and carouse. They purchase an old saw mill, spread the word around town, round up musicians, including their cousin Sammie, and head to the outskirts to get set up. As night falls, the club starts to fill, and the party gets started. Then some unwanted visitors arrive, and things get bloody.
What makes Sinners extraordinary isn’t just its mood (it felt humid), or its scares (though there were two that made me jump, then look at my wife to see if she saw), but its moral clarity. This is a film about how evil operates and infiltrates through the ordinary: inheritance laws, unpaid debts, currency, and the most wonderful ordinary thing of all: Music. The horror here isn’t just the demons lurking in the shadows—it’s the curse of American history.
You could argue that Sinners is about race, but it feels like an oversimplification of its reach. It would be like arguing that 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)is about gravity because gravity is present in different ways in every scene. The story doesn’t play out in a typical Hollywood feel-good (Greenbook (2018)) or feel-bad (12 Years a Slave 2013)) way meant to evoke an obvious moral lesson. These movies are about race. Characters in the film are free from delivering blatant moral messages. In Sinners, race informs a parable-like story in which characters act with high fidelity, despite the audaciousness of the story, for real people. Race might motivate one set of evil characters in the film, but our heroes have more pressing concerns. They aim to transcend our earthly failures. They seek salvation.
Minor spoilers in the next paragraph.
But how can we transcend earthly failures? Music. Although I was disappointed that the trailers spoiled the existence of vampires (I think the film could’ve sold itself as a pure period piece), I was elated to find that the trailer held back much more than I thought. Music’s role in Sinners is the skeleton key to the entire film. In the first act of the film, Smoke and Stack’s greatest goal is to ensure they get good musicians into their club. Getting these musicians is the greatest challenge, and the reason music is so important will become apparent in a show-stopping second act scene that has been the center of most discourse for this film so far. (Aside from box office returns.) Music binds people and culture together, and perhaps it is the closest that evil an come to experiencing earthly pleasure. We all seek it out, though some seek to create while others seek to appropriate.
End of spoilers.
One of the sublime joys of watching Sinners is ruminating afterwards on what these characters, as a whole, and as individuals, are meant to represent in our history. The movie is about all of us.
Sinners
Written and Directed by Ryan Coogler
2025
138 minutes
English
Recommended way to watch (at time of publication): Go to your favorite local movie theater!
You’ll like this if you like: From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), Night of the Living Dead (1968)