🧂 Sinners (2025)

A vampire movie that keeps forgetting it's a vampire movie, and is somehow better for it.

Directed by Ryan Coogler. Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures. 2025.

🧂 Salt: 3 / 10. Barely anything here deserves a shaker; the complaints are all footnotes. and ⭐ Stars: 7 / 10. A gorgeous, ambitious genre swing that mostly connects.

The blues didn't summon the devil. It just told him where to find dinner.

Ryan Coogler spends the first hour of Sinners pretending he isn't making a vampire movie at all, and that's the smartest choice in it. Twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both Michael B. Jordan, doing real, distinct work instead of a gimmick) roll back into 1932 Mississippi Delta with Chicago money and a stolen truck full of liquor, ready to open a juke joint out of an old sawmill. For a long, patient stretch, the film is content to just live there: sharecropper economics, Jim Crow menace sitting quietly under every transaction, and a nephew, Sammie (Miles Caton), whose guitar playing is good enough to reportedly summon spirits. Then a trio of Irish folk musicians shows up at the door smiling a little too wide, and the movie remembers what it actually is.

The juke joint scene is the whole thesis. Before a single fang shows up, Coogler stages an extended sequence inside the newly opened club where Sammie's playing conjures a swirling, time-collapsing montage of musicians past and future, funk guitarists, griots, DJs, all bleeding into the same frame around him. It's the most purely cinematic thing in the film, a direct visual argument that Black American music is a continuous, haunted line, and it earns every bit of the goosebumps it's going for. It also sets a bar the rest of the movie occasionally strains to clear.

Remmick is a genuinely unsettling villain, right up until he isn't. Jack O'Connell plays the lead vampire as folksy and almost apologetic, a predator who'd rather charm his way inside than force it, singing Irish folk songs on the porch while the sun goes down. That restraint makes him scarier than any snarling monster could be. The trouble is the film eventually needs him to lead a small vampire army through a somewhat conventional siege-the-building third act, and the courtly menace gives way to the exact genre mechanics the first hour was so good at avoiding.

Smoke and Stack carry more history than the plot has time for. Jordan's double performance is the film's backbone, two brothers who talk and move identically but read as completely different men once you sit with them, one clipped and businesslike, the other looser and more reckless. Their late scenes with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) and Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) land hard, but the film is juggling so many characters, Delroy Lindo's blues elder Delta Slim, Omar Miller's preacher, Jayme Lawson's Pearline, that a few of them get sketched rather than developed. You feel the seams of a movie that wanted to be a sprawling ensemble piece and a tight horror picture at the same time.

The vampire rules are thin, and the film knows it. Once the turning starts, Sinners doesn't spend much energy explaining its own mythology, sunlight and invitations cover most of it, and just trusts the emotional stakes to carry you past the shrug-worthy mechanics. That mostly works because by the time the fangs come out you're invested in these people, not in the lore, but it does mean the back half occasionally feels like a very well-dressed version of a story you've seen before.

The mid-credits coda is the film's boldest swing. Rather than close on the siege, Coogler jumps decades forward to an aged Sammie in a later era, still playing, with a callback that recontextualizes the whole night as one link in a much longer chain of survival and inheritance. It's unabashedly sentimental, and it earns it, tying the music-as-lifeline idea from the juke joint scene into something that outlasts every character in the room.

So why only three shakers? Because there's genuinely little to be mad at here. The third act leans on siege-movie beats the rest of the film is smarter than, and the ensemble is a touch overstuffed, but those are the complaints of a movie that reached for more than it strictly needed to, not one that got lazy. Coogler swung for something ambitious and hit far more than he missed.

The verdict: A vampire movie that's really a film about music, inheritance, and survival wearing a horror movie's clothes, anchored by a terrific dual Jordan performance and one all-time great musical sequence. The genre plot it eventually has to service is the least interesting thing about it, but by then it's already gotten what it wanted from you.

So, would you let this vampire in? Only if he's got a decent song. Otherwise, keep the door shut and put the record on yourself.

Pass the salt. 🧂