Sinners (2025)
A shining light in the darkness
This review contains the lightest of spoilers for the movie Sinners. No spoilers of specific plot points/reveals, but I make reference to moments that happen later in the runtime.
The moment in Sinners where the vampire horde is outside the juke joint singing and dancing to the Rocky Road to Dublin was the moment my soul ascended out of my body at the Williamsburg Cinemas. It was the moment where I was like I just can’t believe a movie like this can exist. In the strangest coincidences, I love Irish folk music and I love wacky vampire fare and any film that wants to take a big swing – it felt like this was perfect for me, a great time at the movies I was lucky enough to exist in the same space and time to attend.
To accept Sinners into your heart you have to accept its chaotic mash-up of genres. The first half plays like a fairly straightforward prestige drama set in the 1930s about a Black community in the Mississippi Delta, following a set of twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan) on the run from Chicago with a dream of setting up a juke joint. They recruit their young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) and set off to create a night to remember. And then in the second half, bam! vampires appear, in the most unsubtle B-horror movie way possible. It’s great fun. But you do have to accept the dichotomy of these two parts to buy into the movie’s story.
One of the big turns to the fantastical is the summoning of the spirits sequence – I won’t spoil it with a subpar description, but you’ll absolutely know the moment when you see it. In an interview, Ryan Coogler discusses this scene and says that as the writer-director it’s his responsibility to “do the thing that can only happen in this movie,” and I think this ethos extends across the whole film.
Sinners takes full advantage of the strengths of cinema as a medium. Not to get too Nicole Kidman in an AMC ad-y, but every second of Sinners has this dazzling cinematic quality. The music reverberates through you, shots give you the full texture of these character’s lives, their smallest most miniscule expressions made visible, the action sequences feel immediate and larger than life. I went to see the movie alone, but it was a true communal experience to watch. The audience couldn’t help but be caught up in the moment: we were laughing, gasping, yelling at the screen together. Heartbreak really does feel good in a place like this.
At the end of the story, one character reflects to the other that, despite everything that happened, that night at the juke joint was the best night of his life. They had to face down true evil: both the supernatural and the very real, but regardless found this beautiful spark of community with one another. Like the patrons of the juke joint, watching Sinners at this point in time feels like this perfect moment, encased in amber – a shining light in defiance of the dark outside.
Each month I will try to highlight an organization that’s important to me, in a small attempt to help out In These Trying Times. While financial donations are great, there’s also other ways to get involved in community building work — volunteering, building relationships with neighbors, offering up skills and services you might have.
Today I’m shouting out Protect My Public Media.
I sooo loved this movie too.