This week we're talking about a movie that's been living rent free in my brain since I first saw it almost a year ago: Sinners. 

 

In my humble opinion, Sinners is one of the best films made in the past 10 years. Actually, I’d argue that it’s one of the best made in the 2000s, if not one of the best ever, full stop.

 

Sinners is a 2025 Southern Gothic film from writer and director Ryan Coogler (Fruitvale Station, Black Panther), starring Michael B. Jordan in the two lead roles, and featuring an incredible cast including Delroy Lindo, Miles Caton, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku, and Jack O’Connell, among others. It was nominated for a record breaking 16 Oscars, though it only won 4 - Best Actor, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, and Original Score - I personally think it’s a travesty that it didn’t win for Best Picture and Director.

 

Sinners is set in 1932 in Mississippi. As I mentioned, it is a Southern Gothic horror story - according to Dictionary.com, “Southern Gothic is a literary genre depicting life in the southern US and featuring grotesque themes and imagery.” I think that’s simplifying things a bit too much. Wikipedia’s article on Southern Gothic states, “Southern Gothic is an artistic subgenre of fiction, music, film, theatre, and television that is heavily influenced by Gothic elements and set in the American South. Southern Gothic fiction highlights violence and cruelty as features of Southern culture, often through characters whose place in the social order exposes them to such treatment. Common motifs include racism, gender and sexual difference, poverty and disability. Where Gothic literature depicted the intrusion of the barbaric past into the Enlightenment, Southern Gothic depicts the persistence of social trauma in the reconstructed South.” (Why yes, there is a very strange irony in quoting Wikipedia for me, as a school librarian who has spent years telling her students that Wikipedia isn’t a good source. These days, with the rise of AI, Wikipedia is actually a pretty reliable source - everything requires citations in order to be included, and the articles are frequently reviewed, flagged, and fixed by volunteers.)

 

Obviously, this is a more comprehensive overview of what Southern Gothic is, and Sinners absolutely falls into that category. Truthfully, though, Sinners is genre-bending, or maybe genre-defying. It’s horror, with obvious supernatural elements (this series is about vampire media, after all), but it’s also got elements of a gangster movie. It’s a well-done period piece, dealing extensively with the realities of being black in the Jim Crow south, including the Ku Klux Klan, but it also features several sweeping musical numbers. Truthfully - the genre doesn’t matter, at least not in my mind. It’s a deeply powerful film. It’s extremely sensual at times, it’s funny at others, it’s can be gory, it’s inspirational and moving, it’s deeply sad, it's hopeful, and it’s scary, but not because of the vampires. 

 

The movie’s prologue contains important lore for the world of the film: “There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future. In ancient Ireland, they were called Filí. In Choctaw land they called them Firekeepers. And in West Africa they’re called Griots. This gift can bring healing to their communities, but it also attracts evil.” It’s very easy, though, to forget this introduction - it’s about 45 seconds long, and then we jump into the movie. 

 

It opens with Sammie, who's also called Preacher Boy - he's a young sharecropper who works in the fields of the Sunflower Plantation. He’s a talented blues musician, and his father (said Preacher) disapproves. Then there's Sammie’s cousins - the Smokestack twins. Smoke and Stack are played masterfully by Michael B. Jordan, and through incredible feats of acting and phenomenal filmmaking, you don’t confuse these two for very long (I’m dying to make a Lindsay Lohan Parent Trap joke here, but I’m resisting the urge, mostly). They dress in different styles (and most notably, Smoke wears a blue hat and Stack a red one), but it’s more than that - they are entirely different people, with different personalities and affects. (Wunmi Mosaku, who plays Annie, has talked at length in interviews about Michael B. Jordan’s acting prowess - how the energy would shift in such a way when he walked in the room as one character or the other such that she could tell who it was without even seeing him, or how he would hold his face in such a way that one twin had dimples and the other didn't.)

 

The twins buy the old sawmill from an older white man (see: Klan), intending to turn it into a juke joint - one that they will run, with Black food, Black musicians, and Black culture, specifically for Black patrons. They pick up Sammie, then split up to source what and who they need for opening night - other musicians, a sign, food, cooks, even a doorman. Throughout this, we are immersed in the pain of the Jim Crow south - Delta Slim tells Sammie and Stack a story about a musician who was lynched, before falling into a heartbreaking, guttural humming. We see Grace and Bo Chow, a Chinese couple who run two groceries on opposite sides of the street - one serving the white community and one serving the black community. We meet Mary, a white-passing woman whose Black mother raised the twins. We see “free” black men and women picking cotton in fields. Almost every character in the film has a deep backstory, and every word they utter or movement that they make matters. There are no stereotypes here, and every role is treated with respect. (My favorite character is Annie, who could so easily be a comical “voodoo priestess” type. She is such a beautiful, soulful character, played to perfection by Wunmi Mosaku. She feels real, as do the other characters, because she is more than just one thing. She is a Hoodoo practitioner, who is also Smoke's former lover, who is also Mary and Grace's friend, who is also a valued member of the community, who also fries great catfish, and so on.) The most hated character is one who, on the surface, makes a choice that ends up being detrimental to a large number of people - but as soon as you actually think about who they are, their motivations are clear and it's hard to argue with their choice. They couldn’t have chosen differently, because those motivations make them who they are (and apologies, I am being vague in hopes of avoiding spoilers.)

 

We don’t actually get to the vampires until about 40 minutes in. If you’re strictly watching this movie for vampirey-spookiness, that might seem like a bit too much exposition. After all, the vampires are “supposed” to be the big scary bad part. And don’t get me wrong, they are creepy and disturbing - but we’re fighting both racism and vampires here. Not necessarily at the same time, per se - small spoiler: one of my favorite moments is when the main vampire, Remmick, who is a white Irishman with a brogue, is asked, “Y’all Klan?” and he appears genuinely offended. But make no mistake - Sinners is a horror movie about racism, with vampires sprinkled in for supernatural flavoring. The exposition and build-up is required not only to set the scene and meet the characters, but also to learn the stakes. (No pun intended, promise.)

 

So, let’s get to those vampires. The sun is just beginning to set and a man is being pursued by Choctaw men on horseback - and isn’t that a delicious idea, Native American vampire hunters. (One of the things I saw a lot of online after the movie was hopes for a spin-off in that direction. I picked up the book The Buffalo Hunter Hunter recently, hoping it was going in that vein - another not pun - but I’m having some trouble getting into it.) Remmick gains entry into a nearby house easily - a young, white couple happily lets in a pretty messed up looking white man who is being pursued by Native American men. And by the time the hunter knocks on their door, it’s too late - even if they would have been willing to ignore their racism to listen to him.

 

Once night fully falls, and Club Juke comes to life, it’s quickly clear that it is a success, at least in some regards. It’s packed full, drinks are flowing, catfish is frying, and the music is lively and captivating. (We also start to see that despite the numbers, it’s not necessarily sustainable, as many of the patrons can only pay with plantation money, which isn’t going to pay the bills to keep the club open long term.) But it’s at this point that the line from the prologue becomes important - Sammie’s music, his gift, is so powerful that it calls out to both the past and the future in a truly awe-inspiring musical sequence - but Remmick is also drawn to it. And that’s when the vampires really come out to play.

 

The vampires in Sinners follow many of the standard parts of vampire lore - they drink blood, they can’t go in the sun, they don’t like garlic, and they need to be invited inside in order to enter - and that last one is important. These vampires function with a sort of hive mind - a turned vampire retains their own memories and personality, but they also share knowledge with one another, with Remmick as a central repository as their sire. As the pack of vampire grows, they become more manipulative in a rather insidious way, trying to lure and trick those inside Club Juke with their insider knowledge.

 

Remmick is charming, but not in the standard slick, debonair, and polished way that we usually see from vampires - that style stems from Dracula, originally. There’s no capes here. Instead, Remmick is a country boy - not Southern country, but Irish country - and he talks freely to everyone. In conversation with the twins, he compares his plight as an Irishman to the plight of the Black south. He’s earnest, and the similarities are relevant, to a point. He preaches peace, love, and harmony. Equality and music. (Remmick quickly became a fan favorite for cosplay at Cons and Halloween 2025, and there’s many a tiktok been made with people in Remmick costumes lip synching different viral sounds. “In the clerb, we all fam,” tickled me a bit.) He also has a delightful musical performance of the "Rocky Road to Dublin" (Fun fact (maybe? I think it's fun anyway.): I was familiar with this song from my visits to the NY Renaissance Fair when I was in high school - there was an Irish drinking band that my friends and I were big fans of called 3 Pints Shy). You almost, almost believe that Remmick genuinely wants what’s best for his victims - that he’s saving them, not damning them, and they aren't victims at all.

 

I won’t go into any more of the plot or storyline - it’ll give too much away, and I firmly believe this is a movie to be experienced. I have no notes, and could happily yap for hours about this movie. I went into it blind when I first watched it, visiting my brother in Vermont (we did a double header of Sinners and K-Pop Demon Hunters, no regrets.) All I knew was that it was Southern Vampires. I had to sit with Sinners for a while - I liked it well enough when I first watched it, but it wasn’t until it wouldn’t leave my head, and I watched it a second time (and a third…and a fourth…and now I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen it…) that it really hit me just how fantastic it is. There are so many different levels of detail and nuance, much of it historical. The cinematography is phenomenal. Interviews with the creative team talk about some of the techniques that had to be createdto accomplish one of the scenes. And the first time we see Smoke and Stack, they seamlessly pass one another a cigarette - it’s a mindblowing magic trick as you watch the same actor doing it. (There are some great interviews to be found, and articles dissecting different aspects of the film - you can really go down a rabbit hole for some fascinating tidbits and information on both the making of the movie and some of the nuances.) The acting is flawless, which is a testament not only to the cast, but also to the director's strength and the casting team. And the actual script and story itself is so creative, clever, nuances, and smart. Ryan Coogler is truly a visionary, and he's done something incredible with Sinners. 

 

Sinners isn’t a horror movie in the sense that there are jump scares, or that I was afraid to turn the lights off when I went to bed - it is, however, horrifying in so many ways, and it has continued to haunt me.

 

For me, the movie has only gotten better and more powerful every time I watch it. The more I’ve learned about the horrors of our country’s history, and the way we still deal with ramifications of Jim Crow (and how many of our country's government leaders are trying to return to that time), the more meaningful Sinners gets for me. I’ve cried watching it. It’s a beautiful film, and unfortunately one that some people can easily dismiss - whether because it's a horror movie, or “just” a “black movie,” or a musical. (Which is part of why I think it got the Oscar nominations, but not many of the wins. See also: racism.) And that’s a damned shame.

 

Verdict: Six out of five Stakes. Would (and have) watch again. And again. And again, just for good measure.

 

(And don’t miss that after-credit scene! Truly unexpected and so fantastic.)