SINNERS is the first true masterpiece of 2025

“You keep dancing with the devil... one day he's gonna follow you home.”

Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS debuted in theaters Easter weekend, offering an erotic and blood-soaked spin on the vampire genre that had just as much to say about the transcendent power of music, relevant racial commentary, and love as it did- fittingly for the holiday- about death, resurrection, and religion. 

The vampire genre hasn’t been this hot and bloody in a long damn time.

SINNERS follows twin brothers “Smoke” and “Stack” (Michael B. Jordan), who return home in 1932 to their small-town Mississippi roots after serving in the trenches of World War I and making a fortune as gangsters in Chicago.

Back in town, Smoke reconnects with his former flame, the mystic Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), while Stack takes their little cousin, the local preacher’s boy and aspiring guitarist Sammie (Miles Caton), to assemble a musical troupe for the opening night. 

Along the way, Stack finds himself face-to-face with his former lover, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld).

As the twins grapple with the sins of their past, an untold horror in the form of Irish vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) awaits their bar’s opening night that will put them- and their community- to the ultimate test. 

Coogler may have set out to create a bold new property for himself after polishing his teeth on the CREED trilogy and the BLACK PANTHER franchise, but SINNERS is truly unlike anything that has come before. 

While last year’s NOSFERATU was a deeply literary gothic love letter to the vampire genre, Coogler’s SINNERS is a sweaty marriage (and deconstruction) of the blood-sucking symbolism belonging to vampires and a profoundly personal exploration of black culture, music, and the power (and devastation) of having something “taken” from a people. 

The film opens with a voiceover from Annie, telling the audience that music has been used through many cultures as a way to bridge the gap between the living and the dead, between good and evil, from the Indigenous peoples of the plains to the tribes of Africa and the people of Ireland.

Young guitarist Sammie is at war with himself, being the son of a preacher who tells him that music invites evil into the world. Coogler argues here that music, as a gateway, can bring both affirmation and opposition. 

It is Sammie’s gift -and the gift of music in general- that Coogler explores with a jaw-dropping scene about halfway into the film where the bar becomes a melting pot through time itself, showing tribal African dancers side-by-side with a DJs, rap artists, and other musical acts that have defined black culture and art through the centuries. 

It is this scene, also, that attracts the vampire Remmick. 

Where Sammie’s gift invites the people of his past, present, and future, Remmick also sees his own people, the Irish.

It is this experience that he covets, that he craves, that he co-opts as he picks off the people of the bar one by one, becoming a hivemind that partakes in a phantasmagorical jig to “Rocky Road to Dublin”

It is in this macabre, giddy villain of O’Connell’s Remmick - and his attempts to get the survivors to assimilate- that Coogler side-steps the often mishandled aspects of vampires, and embraces that they are at their best when they offer something truly tempting: unity. 

An especially lofty promise in 1930’s Mississippi when Jim Crow and the Klan are both very real- and very much a threat. 

But the survivors don’t want assimilation- they want freedom. It is Coogler’s racial subtext here that is thought-provoking enough, as well as his treatment of music as a tangible “magic” and bridge between space and time, but what is a vampire film- what are vampires- without their sex? 

Bram Stoker, the Irish author who popularized and essentially fathered the vampire as we know it, was a homosexual whose novel “Dracula” was as rife with sexual and homoerotic subtext as it was with the regular text- explosively erotic, especially for its 1897 audience.

In SINNERS, Coogler explores the romantic relationships of Smoke and Stack through Annie and Mary- but also with Sammie and his love interest Pearline (Jayme Lawson), and even the Chinese shop owners Grace and Bo (Li Jun Li and Yao) with three of these pairings sharing a common (and explicitly mentioned) thread: cunnilingus. 

Is this Coogler’s attempt to explore the symbolic belief that this act “preserves” one’s virginity, him exploring the the criticism that the Taoist reasoning for it is “male vampirism”, or is this the director’s way of showing a gender reversal of the temptation from the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Creation? 

SINNERS has a lot to say, and in nearly 2-and-a-half hours Coogler presents it all to the audience in a way that will leave this film open to interpretation for those that seek it, but also aims to be a crowd-pleasing and expertly made monster film for those that wish to be transported to another time in the form of a bold genre exercise that feels as much like a historical drama as it does a horror picture. 

SINNERS is hilarious, moving, and visceral in all the best ways with a dual role from Jordan and scene-stealing turns from Steinfeld, O’Connell, and Delroy Lindo (among others). 

This is the next vampire hallmark. 

And be sure to sit through the credits.