Last Sunday, I went with my friends to the Alamo Drafthouse in Lower Manhattan to see Sinners, the 2025 musical/gangster/horror film written and directed by Ryan Coogler. The film was a powerhouse experience to behold, both being inspired by other films (From Dusk Till Dawn, The Thing, Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight, Devil in a Blue Dress), and being a commentary on white supremacy trying to take from Black culture and possess it, especially with the transcendent power of Black music styles.
The film is set in 1932 in the Mississippi Delta, in Clarksdale and identical twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan) return to their hometown after working for the Chicago Outfit, the mob led by Al Capone. They stole money from both the Italian and Irish mobs, and come back with beer and wine and buy a sawmill from a racist landowner so they can start a juke joint for the Black community in Clarksdale. When the twins say, "So does this mean none of your Klan buddies will be coming around here?," he laughs and says, "The Klan doesn't exist anymore," when he is a lot closer to the Klan than they know.
The twins find their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton, in his screen debut and known as a singer who is just 20 years old currently), an aspiring blues musician whose preacher father (Saul Williams) disapproves of the music, connecting it with the Devil and saying the music brings in evil supernatural forces, with an attitude of "if you dance with the Devil, the Devil will follow you home."
The film does distinguish the twins to the audience by having Smoke dressed in blue and Stack dressed in red, and both of them having different temperaments, though both are gangsters and react with violence when provoked. As the film is set over the course of a day and a night, the twins spend the time gathering support from locals to provide food and entertainment to the juke joint, like the Chinese shopkeepers Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao) as suppliers, Smoke's estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) as a cook, fieldworker Cornbread (Omar Miller) as a bouncer, and blues pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo in a standout performance) and Pearline (Jayme Lawson) as performers. Stack also reconnects with his ex-girlfriend, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a woman with Black heritage who passes for white, who resents that he left her to go to Chicago.
But while they are planning this party, especially for the community who work as sharecroppers in the cotton fields (a commentary on how, despite the film taking place roughly 70 years after the Reconstruction period, that poor Black people in the South would still be working in the field for poverty wages), an Irish vampire, Remmick (Jack O'Connell) flees from Choctaw vampire hunters and turns a Klansmen couple into vampires, and plan to infiltrate the local Black community to turn them into vampires and take from their culture, like trying to enter the juke joint and playing their Irish music outside as a way of connecting as musicians.
The film takes a lot of fascinating turns as a mix of genres, and I don't want to reveal too much, because it's best going in cold and not knowing a lot aside from the initial set-ups. I really enjoyed how the film felt layered and had this controlled chaotic feeling, and that a movie that combined excellent music sequences, gangster violence, and vampires could work so well, with characters that I liked sitting with, and could just enjoy watching even if there was no horror film, to just enjoy the party scenes for a big chunk of the film. Michael B. Jordan carries the film well with playing twin characters, and makes them distinct, so that even when they are interacting with each other onscreen, I could believe it and not think about any movie magic happening behind the scenes.
Hailee Steinfeld was excellent as Mary, with a sultry performance as a woman who felt in between different worlds as a white-passing Black woman, and her role reminded me a lot of Jennifer Beals' performance in Devil in a Blue Dress, where she also played a Black woman who passes for white. There was a scene in Sinners where Stack doesn't want Mary to talk to him in public because he doesn't want white people to think he's bothering a seemingly white woman, and Devil in a Blue Dress had a scene where Denzel Washington's character, in the setting of the late 1940s, is standing around at night waiting for someone, and a white woman approaches him and is trying to chat him up, and he's trying to avoid talking to her or looking at her, because he sees a group of white dockworkers who would think he was trying to bother a white woman, and is trying to avoid trouble. It was interesting for me to notice those parallels, since the film is rightfully compared to From Dusk Till Dawn because of the genre switch midway through the film with the vampires showing up, and I wanted to highlight an underrated noir film that this film may have taken inspiration from.
Delroy Lindo hasn't had a role this good since 2020's Da Five Bloods, and he's fantastic in this film, as a blues musician who is a local legend, but also dismissed as the town drunk, and he's always been a great character actor that gets overlooked, so I'm happy that Coogler recognized his talent and gave him a meaty role to play.
And Miles Caton, as a very young singer, acts as the audience surrogate to introduce us into the story and among the locals, and has a fantastic voice and really gets into the 1930s blues setting of the film, he was a great joy to watch as a "non-actor" among the cast.
I'm happy that this film has been so successful, as an original film with an unusual mix of genres as a musical and horror film and gangster film, and I really enjoyed seeing this with my friends at the Alamo Drafthouse, where their preview package before the film included trailers of 70s vampire Blaxploitation films like Blacula, Scream, Blacula, Scream, and Ganja & Hess, and a fun video of Michael B. Jordan in Japan shopping for anime on a guided tour through a store.
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