Sinners (2025) Review

Sinners is the kind of film that arrives like a thunderclap: audacious, bloody, and brimming with style. Ryan Coogler, reuniting with Michael B. Jordan for their most ambitious collaboration yet, fuses period noir, supernatural horror, and musical fable into a rich, genre-fluid tapestry that’s as intellectually rigorous as it is downright entertaining.

Set in 1930s Mississippi, but filmed with a mischievous modern eye, Sinners follows the return of the Smokestack twins – Smoke and Stack Moore, both played with chameleonic confidence by Jordan – to their racially segregated hometown with a dream: to open a Black-owned juke joint in an abandoned sawmill. Naturally, things don’t go according to plan. The land is cursed, the locals are wary, and, oh yeah… there are vampires. And not the sparkly kind.

What’s most remarkable here isn’t the premise, Coogler has always had a knack for turning the familiar inside out, but the sheer confidence of execution. For the first hour, Sinners doesn’t feel like a horror film at all. Instead, it plays like a soulful slice of Americana, steeped in history and music. We see the brothers hustle, build their club, reconnect with old flames, and rally the community. It’s warm, human, and gorgeously shot on film in Ultra Panavision and IMAX, cinema with a capital C.

Then the vampires come.

Led by a sneering, serpentine Jack O’Connell as Remmick, an undead Irish immigrant with a choir of grinning ghouls, these bloodsuckers are more than just monsters. They’re metaphors made flesh: colonisers, capitalists, cultural cannibals. One particularly chilling moment sees Remmick boast about devouring his victims’ memories, a chilling stand-in for the co-opting of Black culture through history. And it’s not lost on anyone that their incursion begins only once the juke joint starts to thrive.

Michael B. Jordan’s double turn is extraordinary, playing Stack as the fire, Smoke as ice and he carries both roles with charisma and nuance. But the film’s heart lies with young Sammie, played by newcomer Miles Caton, whose blues playing conjures spirits across eras in a jaw-dropping musical set piece. It’s a rapturous moment, a love letter to Black cultural expression that feels both celebratory and defiant.

There are echoes of From Dusk Till Dawn, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and even Jordan Peele’s Us, but Coogler synthesises these influences into something singular. Yes, the tonal shifts are bold and are sometimes jarring, and yes, there’s a sense that Sinners might be trying to do too much. But what a wonderful problem to have. It’s messy, yes. But it’s gloriously, purposefully messy.

Horror, when done well, is never just about the monsters. It’s about what haunts us. And in Sinners, Coogler asks what it means to reclaim a space and to resist erasure. It’s funny, terrifying, and unlike anything else in cinemas right now.

Not just one of the best vampire films in recent memory. Sinners is a triumph of bold, big-screen storytelling.

Movie Rating:

Sinners trailer