Movie Review – Sinners
Director: Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Jack O’Connell
Year: 2025
Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie.
Let me say that again. Ryan Coogler. The guy who made Fruitvale Station and Creed and Black Panther. Made a VAMPIRE MOVIE. Set in the Jim Crow South. About two Black brothers who come home after the Great Migration and open a juke joint and accidentally invite in something ancient and evil.
And it’s one of the best movies of the year.
I don’t know how Coogler keeps doing this. Every movie he makes is technically within a genre — biopic, sports movie, superhero movie, horror — but transcends the genre entirely. Sinners is a vampire movie the way Get Out is a horror movie. Yes there are vampires. Yes there is blood and violence and all that. But it’s really about America. About Blackness. About what happens when you try to build something beautiful in a country that wants to destroy you.
Michael B. Jordan plays twins. Smoke and Stack. Both returning to Mississippi after years up north. They’ve got money — from what we’re not entirely sure — and they want to open a blues club. A place for their people to gather and dance and feel free for a few hours. But there are forces that don’t want Black people to feel free. Some of those forces are white men with guns and badges. And some of those forces are much older.
Coogler uses vampires as a metaphor for. Well. Colonialism? White supremacy? Capitalism? All of it. The vampire in this movie isn’t just a monster — it’s a system. It consumes and propagates. It turns people against their own. It’s been doing this for centuries.
But that makes it sound heavy-handed and it’s NOT. The movie is FUN. There’s a juke joint sequence midway through that’s just people dancing and music playing and for twenty minutes you forget about the horror that’s coming. Coogler understands that joy is part of the story too. Maybe the most important part. The thing worth fighting for.
Jordan is incredible playing two different people. Stack is controlled, calculated, dangerous in a quiet way. Smoke is volatile, emotional, the one who’ll fight even when he can’t win. The scenes where they’re together — and there are a lot of them, credit to whatever digital trickery made that happen — feel like two actual brothers.
Delroy Lindo shows up as their father and absolutely destroys in his scenes. There’s a monologue he gives about what the South took from him that’s Oscar-clip material. Hailee Steinfeld plays a woman from their past and brings a gravity that keeps the romantic subplot from feeling like filler.
The horror sequences are. Look. They’re SCARY. Coogler knows how to build tension. There’s a setpiece in the juke joint that goes from celebration to nightmare in a way that’s genuinely disorienting. The violence is intense but not gratuitous. It means something.
The ending. I won’t spoil it. But it’s not the ending I expected. It’s messier. More complicated. It doesn’t tie things up neatly because colonialism doesn’t tie up neatly. Some things you survive. Some things survive you.
Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie about Jim Crow America and it’s a masterpiece.
What else is there to say.
My rating: ★★★★★
