Review: Sinners (2025)
The most exhausting aspect of Art in the Age of Trump is the tendency to boil down complex works to vapid lefty platitudes. But, for the past two weeks, Ryan Coogler’s Southern Gothic period vampire epic, Sinners, has managed to escape the stigma of Good Liberal Groupthink, becoming a multi-demo sensation and allowing the movies to organically dominate the pop-culture conversation in ways unseen since peak Marvel. And, the reason is simple: it’s a fresh and fully realized vision that shows the often-unrealized potential of the Hollywood studio movie.
Set in Jim Crow Mississippi between the wars, the film centers on the SmokeStack twins (Michael B. Jordan) and their attempts to open a hometown juke joint with cash and booze they stole from the various factions of the Chicago mob. But when the Smokestacks’ cousin, Sammie (Miles Caton), accidentally attracts a crew of vampires with his devilishly raw blues stylings, the joint finds itself under siege by bloodsuckers.
Sinners had plenty of opportunity to turn itself into a race relations meme. But, as he did with Creed and Black Panther, Coogler opts to present a multifaceted view of America’s racial milieu that runs contrary to the dominant narrative of the last decade. The vamps are not nefarious Klan members, but a band of Irish immigrants who have also found themselves cast off and turned into Southern stereotype fodder for those on the coasts. Such an approach allows Coogler to come the closest of any director in recent memory to represent the region dynamically (and pull off a vampire Irish Step Dance sequence as breathtaking as it is tense).
Coogler’s singular perspective is enough to make Sinners worth a watch, but that the film extends the same nuance to religion in the American South positions it as an absolute masterpiece. Its characters are not victims of circumstance or clear-cut villains, but reap the end result of their own compromises. They take responsibility as they realize, whether via age or vampire bite, sooner or later God’ll strike them down,
Sinners is now playing in theaters.