Sinners review: A sweltering, swaggering movie with plenty to chew on
The new film from Black Panther's Ryan Coogler has lots on its mind – but it's also a rollicking good time at the movies.
To call Ryan Coogler’s fifth feature film From Dusk Till Dawn on the Delta wouldn’t be inaccurate but it would be to undermine its riches and everything its director has on his mind. Sinners is a sweltering, swaggering studio movie that is relentlessly entertaining while giving audiences plenty to chew on.
It’s 1932 and twins Smoke and Stack, both played by Coogler’s longtime collaborator Michael B Jordan, have returned home to Clarksdale, Mississippi. Pockets lined with ill-gotten gains from their years in the employ of Al Capone – and, before that, the US Army – they plan to set up the Delta’s most happening juke joint.
Coogler distinguishes the twins not just through costuming and their different attitudes towards women and love but also in the lessons that each imparts on the next generation. Smoke educates a young girl on the value of negotiation, while Stack teaches his cousin about cunnilingus.
The former is one of the film’s core themes (though Sinners has a refreshingly positive attitude towards sex, spit and all things steamy too). This is a movie in which devils offer artists immortality in exchange for their soul, with Coogler keen to stress the uneasy relationship between art and commerce.
With that in mind, it’s thrilling to see the director freed from the yoke of IP and able to execute original ideas in such full-bodied ways. Marvel, for example, probably wouldn’t sanction a scene in which Jordan empties a Browning automatic rifle on a bunch of Klan goons and then throws it down, picks up a Thompson and unloads all over again.
The twins spend Sinners’ patient first act recruiting Clarksdale residents to help them realise their goal. First on the bill is their young cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton), whose preacher father warns him against playing the devil’s music. But Sammie can’t resist the blues, and it’s his soulful voice and fleet-fingered licks that is the catalyst for the horrors that are to follow.
Rounding out the band are hooch-loving bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), Smoke’s Hoodoo-practising partner Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Chinese-American couple Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo Chow (Yao). They’re joined on the dancefloor by love interests Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) and Pearline (Jayme Lawson). Every character is a pleasure to spend time with. And many of them don’t have much left.
With the juke’s opening night under way, it’s not long before the blood begins to flow. And spurt. And spray. Remmick is trying to wangle an invite to the party. Jack O’Connell’s silver-tongued vampire occasionally slips into an Irish lilt and later talks in Cantonese, weaponising language in an effort to gain access to marginalised communities, so that he and his underlings can devour them from the inside out.
Coogler’s vampirism metaphor is as slippery as a blood-slicked corpse. The conflict isn’t as simple as white interlopers infiltrating black spaces. Remmick and his kin are cultural parasites that feed on talent and tradition – and they’re willing to pay for it in gold. Sinners asks prickly questions about the price of assimilation. What parts of your culture are you willing to give up in the name of “fellowship and love”? And what good is harmony if you can’t play your own music?
The screenplay, however, defangs the antagonists. When everything kicks off, the siege is rattled through with electric efficiency, such that the painstaking build-up is undercut by the denouement. The supernatural component is by far the least interesting, least inventive and least important part of a film that isn’t always sure whose story it’s meant to serve.
More than anything, though, this is a deeply musical movie. We’re told that some music is so powerful that it can “pierce the veil between life and death”, a sentiment echoed in the film’s casting. Caton is a backing vocalist for R&B sensation H.E.R., while his character’s preacher father is played by slam poet, musician and film-maker Saul Williams. There’s also a small role for blues icon Buddy Guy and a cameo from guitar hero Christone “Kingfish” Ingram.
But Sinners’ musicality is borne out most radically in its grandstanding centrepiece, which truncates a centuries-long timeline of cultural expression into one literally barn-burning anachronistic musical number. It’s the most ambitious moment in a movie loaded with them.
Sinners is a messy, muscular mash-up of historical drama, trigger-happy horror and prohibition action. Perhaps most importantly, though, it’s a righteous, rollicking good time at the movies.
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Sinners is in cinemas from Friday 18th April 2025.
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