‘Sinners’ Is a Juke Joint, a Prayer, and a Knife With a Melody

There are horror movies that want to frighten you, and there are horror movies that want to possess you—crawl under the ribcage and take up residence like a song you can’t stop humming. Sinners is the second kind. It doesn’t simply stage terror; it composes it. It sets dread to rhythm, turns history into atmosphere, and then—when you think you’ve found your footing—lets the blues bare its teeth.

Ryan Coogler plants the story in 1930s Mississippi and begins with a premise that feels almost domestic in its simplicity: twin brothers return home to open a blues club, a pocket of Black joy carved out of a violent world. Then the movie’s other hunger arrives. Racism is already there, of course, in the air and the laws and the glances that harden into permission. But Coogler adds vampires, and the metaphor is so clean it’s practically indecent: bodies made into resources, culture treated like a buffet, desire disguised as entitlement.

What makes Sinners special—what makes it feel, to me, like one of the year’s best—is that it refuses to choose between the muscular pleasures of genre and the bruised intelligence of allegory. It is a Southern Gothic period piece and a supernatural thriller and, crucially, a musical experience in the oldest sense: not “characters break into song,” but “music is the oldest technology we have for surviving.”

Michael B. Jordan, in dual roles as the Smoke-and-Stack brothers, carries the film with a kind of double gravity: two men sharing one face, two different negotiations with fear. Coogler frames them like myth—tailored suits, sweat-slicked heat, eyes that look past the present as if they’ve already seen what America does to dreams that get too loud. Around them, the ensemble feels chosen for texture: Delroy Lindo’s Delta Slim has the seasoned looseness of a man who’s been alive too long to posture; Wunmi Mosaku brings spiritual weight that the movie treats not as quirky color but as real protection people reach for when the state will not.

Coogler shoots it big—65mm and IMAX scale—yet he keeps returning to the intimacy of bodies in a room, to the way a crowd can become a single organism when the groove locks in. One of the film’s most intoxicating passages is a juke-joint sequence that doesn’t just depict performance; it depicts inheritance. Music becomes a bridge across eras, across the diaspora, across the thin membrane between the living and the dead. It’s as if the movie pauses to remind you that the supernatural isn’t the vampire; it’s the fact that a song can carry the whole past inside it.

Then, because this is still horror, the cost arrives.

The genius of Sinners is that it doesn’t treat “entry” as a simple plot device. The vampire mythology—who gets inside, who is kept out, what it means to cross a threshold—becomes a story about boundaries that were never respected in the first place. Coogler stages whiteness not merely as an antagonist but as a force that wants access while pretending it’s entitled to it. When the violence finally breaks loose, it isn’t chaos for its own sake; it’s the grotesque end point of a logic the world has rehearsed forever.

And yes, the film is messy in the way ambitious work often is. It has the sprawl of a filmmaker trying to hold too much truth in one set of hands. It reaches for epic scope when a quieter cruelty might land harder. But I found that bigness forgivable—more than forgivable, almost necessary—because the movie’s aim is so clear: to make a blockbuster that still feels handmade, moral, and haunted.

By the end, you don’t leave Sinners thinking about “twists.” You leave thinking about atmosphere: the sweat, the gospel warnings, the seduction of the night, the way joy can be a form of defiance and also a beacon that draws predators. You leave thinking about how America has always had two horror stories running at once—the one it tells about monsters, and the one it refuses to tell about itself.

It’s telling that *Sinners* is now being celebrated not just as a hit, but as an institution-level achievement: a record 16 Oscar nominations, the kind of across-the-board recognition that usually goes to safer, more self-congratulatory prestige objects. That doesn’t make it great. But it confirms what I felt walking out: Coogler made something rare—a film that thrills and mourns at the same time, a crowd-pleaser with a bruise under the makeup.

I loved it. And if it’s my second movie of the year, it’s only because the top spot is already taken by something equally hard to shake. Sinners doesn’t ask to be admired. It asks to be remembered—and then it makes remembering feel like the point.