Sinners Review: King of the Vampire Blues Singers

by Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic

Every once in a while, you see a film and know immediately that it will be one of the movies you remember from a given year. Granted, we are not even four full months into 2025, but Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s latest film, has jumped to the front of the line as the first truly must-see movie of the year for me.

The film stars Michael B. Jordan in a dual role, playing twin brothers, Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore, returning to Mississippi after working for Al Capone in Chicago. They intend to use their ill-gotten Chicago gains to open a “for us, by us” juke joint that used to be a sawmill. They recruit their nephew Sammie “Preacher Boy” (musician Miles Caton in a debut role), a gifted blues guitarist, and a few other friends and acquaintances to play music, serve drinks, and be a bouncer at the joint.

A raucous opening night soon gives way to a nightmare, though, as their juke joint is visited by a group of vampires, headed by a man named Remmick (Jack O’Connell), with Sammie’s music talent being a siren song for them.

Coogler’s tale of horror brings together nearly all the vampire lore that has been built up over the years in books and films. They burn when exposed to sunlight. A stake through the heart will kill them. They hate garlic. They must first be invited into a house before they can enter. They have a kind of hive mind and share the pain of the one who turned them. This movie is clearly a love letter to the genre, the stories that have come before, and Coogler has put his own twist on it. Oddly enough, the film this most reminded me of was Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn, especially in the pacing and how patient it is in setting everything up in the first half of the film before going into pure genre fare in the back half.

A love letter to the vampire horror genre is just the tip of the iceberg of what is happening with this film. I am certain there are other influences, inspirations, and meanings behind this film that a northerner from Maine can only begin to understand (there is definitely something to be said about pale-white bloodsuckers showing up and wanting to appropriate the music of a black man for their own purposes). However, one of the biggest is a love for the blues and music.

Everything in this story is grounded in the blues. The film's opening features a voiceover about music's power to connect past, present, and future generations. It also has the power to summon spirits, both good and bad. An ethereal, supernatural, and otherworldly mystique is bestowed upon music in this film, which can point toward the sublime, the spiritual, and mythos that it can be “the devil’s music.” As Sammie’s father, a preacher, says, “You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s going to follow you home.”

One of the most famous legends in the mythology of the blues is about Robert Johnson, who, around 1932, had his supernatural encounter, meeting the devil at the crossroads at midnight and selling his soul to master the guitar.

Sammie is the audience surrogate, a young man standing at his own crossroads. His father is a preacher, asking him to put down the guitar and take up a vocation in the pulpit. His cousins, Smoke and Stack, present an alternative, more appealing path, not just because of the lure of a lifestyle but also because of how playing music makes him feel. 

Sammie connects with an older blues player, Delta Slim, portrayed by Delroy Lindo. Slim’s acquaintance with the blues is hard-earned through life experiences, conveyed in a chilling recounting of one particularly horrible experience playing for white people. But there are more than just connections between Sammie’s and Delta Slim’s generations that the film has on its mind. 

The showcase scene of the film is the dance sequence in the middle of the film when Sammie gets a chance to perform his talent with the backing of Slim, a married singer he has mutual flirtations with, including Pearline (Jayme Lawson), and a few other musicians. What starts out at as just Sammie, Slim, Pearline, and company playing for the patrons of the juke joint suddenly morphs into an eclectic blending of music through the years, reaching back to ancestors from African tribe and forward to rock, funk, R&B, hip-hop, and more, until Sammie and company are almost quite literally, in the words of the Talking Heads, burning down the house.

It must be noted that Oscar-winning composer Ludwig Göransson, who has worked on all of Ryan Coogler’s films dating back to Fruitvale Station, plays a huge role in the music of this film. I don’t always notice the soundtrack and score for all films, but the centrality and vibrancy of the music is simply undeniable.

Michael B. Jordan gives what may be the best performance of his career to date. Bringing two characters to life is a challenge for one actor and he pulls it off magnificently, creating subtle differences between the two brothers, their views on business and the world. One small but effective characteristic in their twin dynamic is an establishing shot early in the film, where Stack lights a cigarette for Smoke. It’s not just showing off the seamless special effects of having the same actor playing two characters on screen simultaneously; as veterans of WWI, there is a reason.

Caton is a revelation in his first movie role. He has a much deeper voice than you’d expect for a person of his size and age—only 21 and slim—and when he sings, it is unique and powerful. I’m enjoying the late-career renaissance that is going on with Delroy Lindo, a terrific and intense actor who I saw in a lot of movies in the 90s and early 00s and who has popped up again here and a few years ago in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods. 

I can’t believe I have gone this long without mentioning Hailee Steinfeld and the most grown-up performance of her career, about as far from True Grit as you could imagine. She is a childhood friend of the twins and has a romantic past with Stack. Speaking of romantic pasts, Wunmi Mosaku appears as Smoke’s estranged wife, who cooks and dabbles in Voodoo-like arts. They have a tragic backstory of shared grief.

I also thoroughly enjoyed Jack O’Connell’s performance as Remmick and the menace that lurks just beneath the surface of his character. There’s also a Chinese couple, Bo (Yao) and Grace (Li Jun Li) Chow, who run two stores in town and have a daughter. Their involvement in the goings-on heightens the stakes (no pun intended) of the night. Also, absolutely outstanding accent work by everyone involved.

It’s becoming exceedingly rare to find original movies that are not created from existing intellectual property and are crowd-pleasers while still having something to say, particularly in horror movies with vampires. From its stellar cast to working with the traditional horror genre tropes to the musical flourishes, director Ryan Coogler has created an instant classic with Sinners. Let Sinners in. (And stick around for the extended coda at the end.)

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars