Sinners: Jordan's twin terror and Coogler's blues-horror work will haunt you (2025)

Sinners (M18)

137 minutes, opens on April 17
★★★★☆

The story: After developing a fearsome reputation as gangsters in Chicago during the 1930s, twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to small-town Mississippi. They set about opening a juke joint, a dance hall with live music and liquor banned under Prohibition law. The siblings encounter their musician cousin Sammie (Miles Caton); farmer friend Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller); Stack’s former lover Mary (Hailee Steinfeld); Smoke’s wife, the traditional healer Annie (Wunmi Mosaku); and the Chinese shopkeeper couple Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao). Their activities attract the attention of angry white townsfolk, as well as supernatural forces more evil than racists.

American writer-director Ryan Coogler reunites with Jordan in Sinners, blending prime drama, horror and blues music in what is possibly the most ambitious, inventive and enjoyable big-budget movie of the season.

The American actor gives a dazzling dual performance as Smoke and Stack, men who have come back to their home town to get rich and – even if they do not know it themselves – confront their demons.

Those demons are more than merely psychological – they are real, and they are horrific. After finding commercial success with studio franchises – the boxing story Creed (2015) and two Marvel movies (Black Panther, 2018; Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, 2022) – Coogler returns to the racial polemics of his first feature, the biopic Fruitvale Station (2013), based on the true story of a black man up against police overreach.

In Sinners, Coogler’s view of the black experience in the United States is channelled into an allegory about white vampires eager to drain black bodies of their vital energies. In a way, it is a follow-up to American writer-director Jordan Peele’s Get Out (2017), which dealt with old, white elites switching their decrepit husks for young, black bodies.

If Peele’s body snatchers were looking to colonise new flesh, Coogler’s vampires are yearning to appropriate their souls.

“White folks like the blues just fine, they just don’t like the people who make it,” says one black character.

As a metaphor, artistic theft viewed as a form of bloodsucking gets uncomfortably literal, but Coogler’s reaction to the charge is unapologetically maximalist. In a trippy historical show-and-tell, he shows African music arriving in the US on slave ships, for it to merge with Irish and Scottish songs, then storming the Top 10 charts.

In sweeping shots made for Imax screens, the ethnography of the South is succinctly revealed – shopkeepers Grace and Bo Chow, representing the thousands of Chinese immigrants who settled in the South, being neither black nor white, are the only people to walk freely in a segregated world.

Hot take: Coogler blends the musical, violent revenge drama, social commentary and horror film into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.