Ryan Coogler’s Reteams with Michael B. Jordan for Vampiric Historical Allegory
DIRECTED BY RYAN COOGLER/2025
Sinners claims the honor of being the first much talked about film of 2025 mainly because it gives us so much to talk about. It uses horror to fuse several genres together, crime, action, historical drama, and even the musical. Director Ryan Coogler depends on all of them to express how art, crime, race, politics, and spirituality all intersect and interact with one another.
As the story sets itself up, we get what could become a great crime film. It even starts with the film noir idea of beginning at the end when Sammie, a young guitar player in 1932 Mississippi played by musician Miles Canton, stumbles into his preacher father’s Sunday service, drenched in blood, holding the neck of what’s left of his instrument. His father tells him to let go of what he views as a tool of the Devil.
We then go back roughly twenty-four hours when Sammie’s cousins, Identical twins both portrayed by Michael B. Jordan, buy an abandoned mill from a big white man. When he says that the Klan doesn’t exist here, we know he has a pointy hood at home. The brothers have come back home from Chicago, where they may have worked for Al Capone, with wads of cash, Irish beer, Italian wine, and the plan to open a juke joint that night.
The twins split up and go to work. Smoke, the more deliberate, colder blooded brother, keeps an eye on the booze as he enlists a Chinese couple who operate the general store on the town’s color line (Relena Yu and Yoa) for food and refreshments. Stack takes Sammie along as he picks up some other key members for the evening. The first is Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) a drunken but extremely talented bluesman. For security, he grabs the hulking Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) out of the cotton fields in a very funny scene.
They also contend with the women from their past. Stack runs into Mary (Hailee Steinfied), a woman who easily passes for white where the laws and ways of time and place put up barriers in their relationship. Smoke gets Annie (Wummi Mosaka) to do the cooking for the night. They share the loss of a child between them. Both these women as well as Andrene Ward-Hammond’s Ruthie, a married woman Sammie falls for, provide the grace and heart to the story as well as it’s vivid sensuality. Sex is portrayed with a slight tinge of discomfort in the viewing; not because its dirty, but the detail creates an intimacy leads to a sense of voyeurism in us.
Coogler brilliantly deals with the exposition by using the David Mamet method of ignoring it. It’s never explained exactly how Smoke and Stack got the cash and alcohol and why they came back to town. Coogler allows us to draw our own conclusions as we get to know each character as person instead of plot component.
When dusk hits, Remmick, a southern man of Irish descent played by Jack O’Connell races into frame as if he came from the nextdoor screen of the multiplex, chased by a group of Choctaw Indians. He finds refuge in a couples cabin to their bad fate. The fangs and dark metal sound cue tell us what genre will be taking over.
Remmick and his brood want Sammie. When the juke opens, we soon learn that he carries a power with his guitar that can transcend time and form a bridge from past to future. Coogler expresses this beautifully in a daring Steadicam shot that delivers the same exhilaration of Scorsese’s Copa Cabana from Goodfellas. Remmick believes Sammie’s gift can bring his own ancestors back. He at first offers to make everyone in the juke vampires and gives a halfway persuasive argument of why they should take it. When the juke gang refuse the proposal or to give up Sammie, the vampires strike from outside, turning loved ones to draw out others or force them to invite the creatures in.
In an interview with Sean Fennessy on The Big Picture podcast, Ryan Coogler talked about how he struck when he could to get shooting with crew he had gathered over his previous projects before adulthood pulled them completely from the pure dedication to their art that youth allows for. The movie feels like everyone is at the top of their game and giving it their all. Composer Ludwig Goransson deftly moves between music from both the various cultures portrayed as well as film genres the writer/director is pulling from. Durald Arkapaur’s cinematography captures the heat of a Delta day and both the danger and allure of it’s nights. Ruth Carter designs costumes that announce aspects of the characters before the actors speak any dialogue.
His strongest collaboration is with his lead actor. In working with Michael B. Jordan in all of his five movies, the two have built both a John Ford/John Wayne and Scorsese/De Niro relationship. Coogler knows the actor’s persona and classic strengths to play to and knows what to tap into that we haven’t seen. He plays both brothers with differences both broad and subtle, constructing them so well I forgot they were played by the same actor while watching.
The biggest complaint of the film is that it becomes overstuffed and it’s tight structure in the beginning unravels by the end. While I won’t disagree, I see it as a compromise to serve the gumbo of idea and themes that Coogler mixes together as he also portrays a rich community. African American writers who use genre from Chester Himes to current practitioners Walter Moseley, Gary Phillips, and S.A. Cosby often often employ it to hang out in the society with a baroque world building style where you feel the cast of characters wanting to burst off the page. Coogler applies that concept to film language. In the world he shows us, much like the people living in it, things don’t end up neat and tidy. The concluding scene when the more human monsters are dealt with may feel like a tacked additional ending, but it fits better when you see the mid credit sequence that feels like the true ending.
Coogler and his collection of fellow talented outlaws have created a work that breathes and beats with a pulse. For a tale where the threat of death always hangs over, it deals with and expresses life with celebration. It looks at the compromises we make not only to cling to it but to experience it at its fullest, particularly if society has made that life so hard fir you. With all the gunfire and fangs coming at us, the biggest moment of suspense is if Sammie will let go of that guitar neck that brought the demons after it created joy, sex, and freedom.