Michael B. Joran as Smoke in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners.Eli Adé/Warner Bros.
Sinners
Written and directed by Ryan Coogler
Starring Michael B. Jordan, Delroy Lindo and Hailee Steinfeld
Classification 14A; 137 minutes
Opens in theatres April 18
Critic’s Pick
Sinners grounds us before letting loose. South Mississippi, 1932. Bootleggers inbound. That scarred kid limping toward his father’s church with a busted guitar? That’s Sammie – the preacher’s son and blues prodigy. The two sharply dressed men pulling into town with crates of beer and fists full of Al Capone’s money? That’s Smoke and Stack, war vets turned would-be entrepreneurs. Later, when we’re shown a man with a dusty fedora and haunted eyes wailing through a blues solo in a candlelit juke joint, he’s introduced as Delta Slim. And once the camera cuts to a woman encircled by bone charms, herb jars, and candles burning low? That’s Annie, the hoodoo conjurer-caterer.
Horror films – vampire stories, in particular – are the experts at trading in these archetypes. You’ve got your holy fools and haunted preachers, your skeptics, sinners, and seductresses. They’re our shorthand for high stakes. These figures come to us already half-drawn – archetypes neatly slotted into place, from the comical to the spiritual. Illustrated just clearly enough to feel familiar, until that bloodletting begins.
In Ryan Coogler’s hands, these roles are just the starting gate – from there, the film bolts forward and rarely circles back. Genre purity has never been something that Coogler holds sacred. If anything, Sinners is the freest that the Creed and Black Panther filmmaker has ever been: stitching drama to spectacle, folding the personal into the political, slipping past the limits of what studio films are supposed to do in favour of what they still might dare to try.
It’s not just that Coogler dares to do something different with Sinners – it’s that he lets it all wrestle, sweat, and bleed together. The boundaries that might keep the horny vampire pulp in one corner, delta blues in another, and the ache of Black history humming politely in the background? He tears through them like some stage curtain mid-performance. No surprise from a man who claims Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone as his all-time favourite show, citing the resurrection tale The Last Rites of Jeff Myrtlebank as a guiding spirit. Genres don’t co-exist here – they clash and harmonize, smear across the screen like oil on water. One moment it’s a barroom hymn, the next a vampire stake session. And somewhere in the middle, the past and present are dancing barefoot on the same splintered floor.
Genres don’t co-exist in Sinners – they clash and harmonize, smear across the screen like oil on water.Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures/Warner Bros.
That dance is the beauty and curse of Sinners, a film possessed by more than creatures – by haunted men, land, and lineage. Coogler sets the first act deep in the viscera of the Mississippi Delta. The camera starts close, almost prayerful, hovering over the faces of men returning home: Michael B. Jordan, split in two as he plays twin brothers Smoke and Stack, eyes cloaked in shadow, suits cut like armour. The siblings speak in quiet tones about a plan that involves stolen money from Capone, a juke joint raised from sawdust, and the white owner who won’t make it easy to see it change hands. The dream is freedom – but the South remembers. And it rarely forgives.
Jordan, known for his raw talent in four previous collaborations with Coogler, is more than capable of steering the emotional terrain here. Coogler threads Smoke and Stack through schemes, scabs, and seductions – Jordan commands as always, never settling into a single arc for too long. Smoke tries to pull his brother from the edge, but Stack clings to regret like a second skin. Their dynamic burns, but sometimes the world around them – the land, the legacy, the looming violence – feels more fully realized than the men themselves, a sign that Coogler is ultimately more drawn to what shapes these men than to the men themselves.
From there, the twins rekindle ties with the very people who’ll help them build something new – and what begins in reunion curdles into a kind of resurrection. Sammie (Miles Caton), their cousin, plays the blues like he’s possessed. Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) is soaked in whisky and memory. And Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) is Stack’s long-lost lover – light enough to pass, heavy enough to haunt. Together, they build and promote their sacred little something – a juke joint, part sanctuary, part spectacle – with booze, drinks and dance, for one night only. But in Coogler’s hands, the music doesn’t just summon memory. It summons vampires. And when a request to enter is offered – and denied – that refusal is met with violence.
In Sinners, Coogler threads the needle between myth and metaphor, casting vampirism as either escape or entrapment.Courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures/Warner Bros.
That fire, of course, is a choice offered to them – though not the kind you’d think. In Sinners, Coogler threads the needle between myth and metaphor, casting vampirism as either escape or entrapment, depending on your worldview. Join us and be free from all that befalls you. His creatures don’t just thirst for blood – they ache for something older, deeper: a power stolen and recirculated through generations. Art and legacy that can inspire, seduce, and consume. America is a country saddled with monsters, born as much from slavery, bigotry, and betrayal as from the supernatural. These monsters know us all too well.
Coogler is a man rooted in what he loves – the pulse of hip hop, the soul of blues, the weight of generational Blackness. His uncle only ever spoke of Mississippi while listening to the blues, and that kind of memory lives in Sinners – a celebration, a séance, a shout. But in his rush to honour every influence, the film occasionally loses its way. The complexity can sometimes cloud the clarity.
But all that aside, sometimes what’s wrong with a movie isn’t what travels. The greater point is that what powered it was passion: raw and messy, at times scattered, but unmistakably Ryan Coogler.
Special to The Globe and Mail