Sinners

Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is not just a film—it’s a cinematic séance. Set in 1932 Jim Crow-era Mississippi, this supernatural horror story resuscitates buried traumas, breathes life into folklore, and sets it all ablaze with righteous fury. 

What begins as a quiet return home morphs into a fever-dream of blood, blues, and reckoning, as “Sinners” merges historical reality with hoodoo mysticism and Southern Gothic dread to deliver a genre-defying masterpiece.

At the heart of the narrative are twin brothers Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack”—both portrayed with mesmerizing distinction by Michael B. Jordan—World War I veterans trying to carve out a future by opening a juke joint in their hometown of Clarksdale. 

But their homecoming turns harrowing when they uncover a parasitic evil feeding off their community, embodied most viscerally by Remmick, a white vampire musician who’s as charismatic as he is monstrous. He doesn’t just suck blood—he steals sound, identity, and culture. Coogler doesn’t whisper his critique—he howls it.

Drawing inspiration from the legend of Robert Johnson and the crossroads mythos, Coogler infuses Sinners with Southern Black folklore, Yoruba deities, and hoodoo ritual. 

The figure of Elegba, the guardian of paths and choices, looms as a spiritual presence, guiding (and sometimes mocking) the characters as they navigate a landscape littered with racial violence and metaphysical threats. 

The result is a rich, textured mythology that grounds the film’s supernatural horrors in lived Black experience—where every ghost is tethered to history, and every monster mirrors the ones etched in textbooks.

Ludwig Göransson’s score is a masterclass in emotional layering—mixing raw Delta blues with cinematic scope. His work, steeped in field recordings and haunted guitar riffs, becomes a character in itself, channeling the pain and passion of a people whose music outlives their wounds. 

“Sinners” captures the Southern heat and hell with stunning clarity. Every frame feels aged in bourbon and blood—cinema that burns like a backwoods sermon.

There’s a tactile grit to “Sinners” that feels both classic and contemporary. The practical effects nod to ‘80s creature features, while the stylized action moments—evoking ‘90s grit à la Rambo—clash spectacularly with the ornate period setting. 

It’s anachronistic, chaotic, and completely intentional. In Coogler’s 2025, history is not just remembered—it is ruptured and reassembled through a horror lens that exposes the real monsters: exploitation, silence, and stolen legacy.

Jordan’s dual performance is nothing short of hypnotic. With the aid of real-life twins Noah and Logan Miller and dialect coach Beth McGuire, he creates two fully distinct individuals—Smoke, the idealist bruised by hope, and Stack, the skeptic scarred by war. 

Their chemistry, or perhaps their dissonance, anchors the film’s emotional core. As the brothers face off against literal and figurative vampires, their personal demons prove just as lethal.

Remmick is one of modern horror’s most chilling metaphors for cultural appropriation. He doesn’t just imitate the blues—he ingests it, regurgitates it, and sells it back to the world, sanitized and soulless. Through him, Sinners lays bare the grotesque cycle of theft that haunts Black artistic expression.

Amid the film’s supernatural chaos, “Sinners” also carves space for its female characters—particularly Mama Odetta, a hoodoo priestess played with quiet ferocity by Aunjanue Ellis—whose presence anchors the story in generational wisdom and the often-overlooked burden Black women carry as spiritual protectors, healers, and witnesses to trauma.

In contrast, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a white outsider drawn to the seductive pull of Black ritual and vampiric lore, enters the coven not out of malice, but as an act of rebellion—fascinated by a power structure that defies her own genteel Southern constraints. 

Her arc evokes the rebellious femininity of ’90s cult figures like Nancy from The Craft or Akasha from Queen of the Damned—women who crave transformation, even if it means aligning with darkness.

Coogler doesn’t offer easy catharsis. The film builds toward an apocalyptic fever pitch, where history itself seems to bleed out onto the screen. By the time the final note is struck, and the last flame extinguished, we’re left in a world that feels eerily like our own—chaotic, fractured, and haunted by unresolved grief.

In the ever-evolving landscape of horror, “Sinners” isn’t just another period piece with supernatural seasoning. It’s a landmark in the genre—a Southern-fried scream into the abyss of American memory. 

Coogler has crafted a film that’s equal parts exorcism and elegy. In this tale of blood, rhythm, and reckoning, Coogler reminds us that the past isn’t behind us—it’s buried beneath our feet, clawing to be heard.

“Sinners” isn’t just a period horror—it’s a cinematic séance, an exorcism of American amnesia.