Movie Review: SINNERS starring Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo

Ryan Coogler’s highly anticipated latest film, Sinners, is out now in theatres. This feature has been marked on my calendar for quite some time, as the film garnered a lot of attention months before its release.

The film stars Michael B. Jordan as twins Smoke and Stack, more properly known as “The Smokestack Twins.” The cast is also rounded out with Saul Williams, Miles Caton, Li Jun Li, Delroy Lindo, Wunmi Mosaku, Hailee Steinfield, and Jack O’Connell.

On the surface, Sinners follows the Smokestack twins as they return to Mississippi in the early 1930’s from Chicago as they set to round up an impressive roster of talent to open a speakeasy with specialty beer and wine, funded by seed money the twins obtained in the North. The joint is supposed to offer a place of release featuring talent from Blues performers Sammie Moore and Delta Slim (played by Caton and Lindo,) at the tail end of the Prohibition Era.

The horrors of their reality materialize as the audience sees the backdrop of the film set in a Jim Crow Southern state where the KKK is still very much active. These horrors then resituate themselves as an afterthought as the Smokestack twins and their guests find themselves against a murderous group of vampires that are intent on killing every single person in the joint before sunset. The survivors must band together to survive until daybreak, but the body count is quickly climbing.

While that is a surface-level summary of the flick, the metaphorical and layered meaning behind the film and its contents is immense, enough to write a master’s thesis. The film also serves as a celebration of Black culture and music, tracing the foundation Blues music has had on all modern popular music. This sentiment is alluded to with perhaps one of the most beautiful moments of cinematography in the film where Caton’s Sammie Moore performs an original song, “I Lied to You.” During this montage, Coogler curates a scene that is a visual tour-de-force that I won’t spoil, but when you see the film, you’ll know exactly what I mean.

The motivation behind the musical innovations of the film follows the working theory that some musicians create music so pure, that it can pierce the veil between the past, present and future, connecting ancestors through different moments in time. Along with this metaphor of ancestral celebration, it seems the film has some other underlying meanings, like the concept of “vampire” being linear with the idea of colonization. With the vampires maintaining a hive-mind mentality, the film also explores themes of cultural exploitation and the white gaze.

Michael B. Jordan stands out in his dual performance of both Smoke and Stack. And, Miles Caton stole every moment of screentime he was given, and his musical performances were hypnotic. Hailee Steinfield was also captivating in her performance.

I also really enjoyed Jack O’Connell as the film’s villain. Sinners is absolute feast of a film rich in culture, history, and a dissection of exploitation and innocence that runs much deeper than a simplistic horror film about vampires. The deeper meaning and connotations Coogler makes by intertangling horror and culture is truly divine. I found a lot of similarities to Robert Rodriguez’s 1996 vampire flick From Dusk Till Dawn. The film definitely pays homage to this earlier title and will be remembered as one of the best horror films to debut in 2025.

Sinners earns an A+.