As a director and screenwriter, Ryan Coogler has built a career as an unparalleled interpreter of other people’s intellectual property. With Creed, he became the first person who isn’t Sylvester Stallone to write a film in the Rocky franchise. With Black Panther, he nailed the near-impossible assignment of adapting a thinly-drawn Marvel character conceit—created by two white guys, or one white guy, depending on which white guy you ask—and turned it into an iconic, globally-beloved blockbuster. With Wakanda Forever, Coogler gave us an epic work of underwater anti-colonialism, despite the death of the film’s star (Chadwick Boseman) and a global pandemic.
Now, over a decade into making feature films, Sinners feels like the first time Coogler is going deep into his own archive—he’s said it’s based on family lore, told to him by his Uncle James, who moved from Mississippi to Oakland during the Great Migration.
It’s a slow burn campfire story where the Mississippi skies and cotton fields are so huge they had to be shot in IMAX, and the music gets so wild it dissolves the boundaries of space and time.
The story starts out in the 1930s, when Sammie (Miles Caton), a sheltered preacher’s son receives a visit from his sharp-suited twin cousins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan). The cousins have returned from Chicago with a suspicious amount of money and a plan to turn the old cotton mill into a juke joint, starting that night. For the film’s first half they criss-cross the landscape, breezily assembling a dream team of musicians, cooks, and bouncers.
Many of the actors Coogler cast are also musicians—most notably Caton, a wunderkind multi-instrumentalist who has never been in a film before. He has a soft, unfinished quality that feels all the more eerie when it disappears anytime he begins to play guitar. Caton is surrounded by actors at the top of their game: Not only Jordan, but Wunmi Mosaku as Annie, Jayme Lawson as Pearline, and Hailee Steinfeld as Mary—all radiant on camera and main characters in their own right. Everyone in this film is so good they’re shooting off sparks.
Before a writing teacher took him aside and told him that he should consider screenwriting, Coogler was a dedicated football player. In the likewise ego-heavy occupation of movie-making, he’s built a reputation of enthusiastic collaboration. When Stallone showed up at the Creed shoot every morning with pages of handwritten notes on how he thought the day’s filming should go, Coogler rolled with it. In a back and forth with Sinners cinematographer, Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Coogler constantly credits her for changing his mind on how the film should be shot.
In previews, the second half of Sinners looks like a straight-up vampire flick, but Coogler has an open beef with genre. “Genres in music are mostly based in racism,” Coogler explained, in a 2024 conversation with Jordan Peele. Grunge is blues, he continues. Don’t try to tell him otherwise. Sinners is not a genre film, and by the time the final credits roll (stick around for a post-scroll scene) the audience has been taken to church and seen a full-on blues concert, Irish folk dancing, and Gullah folklore. They'll also sit in on a vivid cunnilingus how-to and witnessed spaghetti-western cinematography applied to the Mississippi Delta.
Using vampires to smuggle your weird art movie into a theater is another time-worn cinematic tradition (Let the Right One In, Only Lovers Left Alive), but that doesn’t make this variation any less surprising.
When the action comes, it moves fast. Not all of it makes sense, but it’s so large on the screen and beautifully shot that you go with it anyway. What starts out as a movie is, by the end, a haunting.
A lot will be written about Sinners—about insiders and outsiders and Black joy and vampirism and what it all means. It’s a film about the past that feels specific to this particular time and place. Some of the greatest pleasures of this world are built with the imperfect people around us. Outside, something is waiting in the darkness.
Sinners opens in wide release on Fri April 18.
