Sinners (2025)

4 Stars (out of 4)

Blues Feed

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

With Sinners, filmmaker Ryan Coogler turns to the horror genre with mesmerizing results, a movie of high style and lofty ambition, full of music and love, suggesting that some monsters are more horrid than others.

Sammie (Miles Caton) barges through the doors of a church, bruised, bloodied and beaten, and clutching a broken guitar. One day earlier, Sammie's cousins, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) have returned to Mississippi from their time in Chicago with enough money to open their own Juke Joint.

It's 1932. Stack and Sammie drive into town to find what they need for opening night. Grocery store proprietor Bo Chow (Yao) will provide food and his wife Grace (Li Jun Li) will paint a sign. They recruit old bluesman Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) to play piano and the king-sized Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) to handle security. Sammie invites the pretty Pearline (Jayme Lawson), while an ex-lover of Stack's, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) invites herself, and Smoke reunites with an old partner, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku).

The party starts well, with everyone having a great time. Then Sammie takes to the stage with his special gift: his music is so true that it pierces the veil between life and death. This, unfortunately, invites some unwanted guests.

With Sinners, Coogler continues on his fearless filmmaking path, looking at Blackness in America, but also exploring themes of love, grief, and the strength of women; it somehow feels of a piece with movies as disparate as Fruitvale Station and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

It begins by creating a community of people who feel like they have a shared history; they are family and they belong together, help each other.

From there, comes the concept of the performer whose music is so true that it can pierce the boundaries between life and death. To demonstrate this, Coogler creates a non-stop sequence so beautiful, so dazzling, so awesome that it's transporting. It's spine-tingling. We feel all the moving bodies on screen separately, but as one. It's as if a cosmic community of beautiful, marginalized people were able to come together and be free for a moment.

But then the movie drops its most powerful idea, which, without giving too much away, argues that the definition of monsters and/or community is squarely in the eye of the beholder, some inclusive, and some exclusive. Sinners knows which is better, and demonstrates this in no uncertain terms. Especially in these terrifying times, it's an essential movie, perhaps even on a level with Get Out.