Director/Screenplay – Ryan Coogler, Producers – Ryan Coogler, Zini Coogler & Sev Ohanian, Photography – Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Music – Ludwig Görnsson, Visual Effects Supervisor – Michael Ralla, Visual Effects – Baraboom, Base FX, Industrial Light & Magic, Light, Outpost, Rising Sun Pictures & Storm Studios (Supervisor – Espen Nordahl), Special Effects Supervisor – Donnie Dean, Makeup Effects/Prosthetics Designer – Mike Fontaine, Production Design – Hannah Beachler. Production Company – Proximity Media.
Cast
Michael B. Jordan (Smoke Moore/Stack Moore), Miles Caton (Sammie Moore), Hailee Steinfeld (Mary), Delroy Lindo (Delta Slim), Wunmi Mosaku (Annie), Jayme Lawson (Pearline), Jack O’Connell (Remmick), Li Jun Li (Grace Chow), Omar Miller (Cornbread), Yao (Bo Chow), Lola Kirke (Joan), Peter Dreimanis (Bert), Buddy Guy (Old Sammie), Dave Maldonado (Hogwood), Saul Williams (Jedidiah), Helena Hu (Lisa Chow), Sam Malone (Terry)
Plot
1932. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack Moore return to the small Mississippi Delta town they grew up after years involved in the Chicago underworld. They purchase a sawmill and announce plans to convert it into a juke joint – a live bar/club for African American patrons. They set about recruiting a bunch of people for the opening night, including their cousin the blues guitarist Sammie, the pianist Delta Slim, the Chinese suppliers Bo and Grace Chow, the sharecropper Cornbread as bouncer, and Annie, the wife that Smoke abandoned, as cook. They open to great success. They are then visited by the Irish drifter Remmick and two locals who offer to come play as a bluegrass band, but Smoke refuses them entry. However, Remmick is a vampire who has turned the others. Waiting outside, they proceed to attack and turn anybody who comes out. The vampires then surround the building, forcing the others into a siege.
Sinners was the fifth film from director Rayn Coogler. Coogler made a debut with the indie film Fruitvale Station (2013), which received considerable attention, including multiple awards as a newcomer director (and also brought to attention Michael B. Jordan who has appeared in all of Coogler’s films since). Coogler then went on to Creed (2015) and the runaway sensation of The MCU’s Black Panther (2018) and to a lesser extent its sequel Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). In other genre works, Coogler has also executive produced Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021) and the upcoming Marvel tv series Eyes of Wakanda (2025- ) and Ironheart (2025- ).
Sinners is a Vampire Film. There has been a movement in the last few years to try transposing vampires into different settings and eras. In this case, Coogler transports the vampire film to the 1930s Mississippi Delta and sets it among the black communities there. The African-American vampire film is something that goes all the way back to the heyday of the Blaxploitation film with Blacula (1972) and Ganja & Hess (1973). There have been sporadic other examples such as the fascinatingly weird existential vampire film The Transfiguration (2016) and Spike Lee’s Ganja & Hess remake Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014). You could probably also include here Wesley Snipes as the titular vampire hunter in Blade (1998) and sequels. In the translocation of the vampire film to different locales, we have had the ghetto set Black As Night (2021) and (somewhat) Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020). Perhaps the closest of these that Sinners comes to is Bloodrunners (2017) with Ice-T as a vampire who leads a speakeasy in Chicago during the Prohibition Era.
Actually, the film that Sinners comes the closest to is The Devil and the Daylong Brothers (2025), which was released three months earlier and also made a virtue out of its Southern (Alabama) location and had a trio of mixed-race brothers hunting soul snatchers, while also tapping the vein of Southern blues music. Ryan Coogler does a fantastic job in depicting the 1930s Southern era. A decent budget has been thrown at the film and so it looks good. What is also welcome about this is that what we get is not the sanitised version of historical eras that is now prevalent in most US film and tv ie. everyone in the past lived in a Utopian racial harmony. But rather it is a work that feels authentic to the real issues of the Jim Crow era such as the Klan, sharecroppers and the problems of company scrip.
(l to r) Jayme Lawson, Wunmi Mosaku, Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton and Li Jun Li at siege from vampires
Sinners is a fantastically well-polished film. Ryan Coogler’s dialogue is tight and smart – some of the confrontations as Jack O’Donnell and later Omar Miller wait to be invited into the barn are charged and razor sharp. What you also cannot help but notice is that there is nothing that suggests anything of what we are watching is a horror film for the first 42 minutes – this is something that gives Coogler the time to introduce his milieu and create an ensemble of characters that we come to identify with throughout. As the two brothers, Michael B. Jordan gives his best performance for Ryan Coogler to date, coming off as wonderfully smooth and in charge. Although there is not a performance from any of the other principals that lets the show down either.
Ryan Coogler frequently shows off in the director’s seat. One of the most imaginative sequences is one where Miles Caton picks up his blues guitar and plays to the dancing crowd and weaves his musical magic where suddenly we see rappers, electric guitarists and cultural dancers from Africa and China weaving in and out of the crowd. (The whole musical magic outside of time and space aspect of the script is one aspect of Sinners that is never explored as much as you wish it was). You also have to applaud the editing ingenuity that allows Coogler to crosscut between Jayme Lawson singing on stage and segueing into a provocative dance and a beating behind the scenes and Michael B. Jordan and Hailee Steinfeld having sex out the back. The latter sections of the film have Coogler more than effectively segueing into a full-on From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) climax and a fantastically staged confrontation between Miles Caton and lead vampire Jack O’Connell.
