Blues, Blood, and the Bite of Injustice: Sinners Is a Horror Hit with Soul

For a lot of horror fans, seeing a great non-horror filmmaker take a stab at our favorite genre would be a dream come true. We want someone like Martin Scorcese or Christopher Nolan to make something genuinely horrific, and with Sinners, that dream has finally become a reality. This movie was made by Ryan Coogler, the guy behind Creed and Black Panther, so naturally, there’s been a ton of excitement for it. Sure, Coogler isn’t Nolan or Scorcese, but he’s a truly great filmmaker in his own right, and along with a lot of other horror fans, I couldn’t wait to see what he would do in the horror sandbox.

Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Caton, Jack O'Connell, Wunmi Mosaku, Jayme Lawson, Omar Miller, Li Jun Li, and Delroy Lindo. The film is set in the 1930s Jim Crow South, and it follows two twins, Smoke and Stack, who’ve just returned to their hometown.

The brothers buy an old building and start a blues club, but when opening night comes, they get a lot more than they bargained for. As the sun goes down, the club comes under attack by a group of vampires, and the twins and their friends have to do everything they can to survive until dawn.

If you’re a hardcore horror aficionado, that plot synopsis might sound a bit familiar. It’s very reminiscent of the 1996 cult classic vampire flick From Dusk Till Dawn, and much like that movie, Sinners also divides pretty evenly into two halves. For about the first half of its runtime, this film plays almost entirely like a drama, with only a couple of brief hints of the horrors to come.

It’s basically just Smoke and Stack getting everything ready for their big night, and despite the lack of scares, this part of the story is riveting. For starters, writer/director Ryan Coogler does an amazing job of recreating the movie’s nearly century-old setting. Granted, I’m neither from the South nor 100 years old, but to my admittedly amateur eyes, it looked pitch-perfect.

Everything from the clothes to the cars to the dialogue and accents just screams old-timey southern Black culture, and if that doesn’t transport you to this bygone era, the score is sure to do the trick. It’s all blues music, and even though that’s not my preferred genre, I still found myself tapping my toes to these soulful melodies.

That unique combination of sights and sounds brings the 1930s Jim Crow South to life in a way few (if any!) horror films ever have, so the first half of Sinners is an immersive experience that’ll grab you right from the get-go. It’s exactly what you’d expect from a great filmmaker like Ryan Coogler, but it’s not the only thing this movie gets right.

The cast is also top-notch, so I could probably write a whole review just praising all the excellent performances. But of course, there’s more to a film than just acting, so I’ll limit myself to the two standouts. First, I have to talk about Michael B. Jordan. He plays both of the twins, and he’s just as good as you’d expect. 

He trades in his typical acting style for a more Southern gangster vibe, and if I didn’t know any better, I’d think this guy really was from the South (I looked it up, and he’s not). He’s that good, and to the surprise of no one, Jordan doesn’t lose an ounce of his signature charm. It’s just a great performance all around, so pretty much every time one (or both!) of his characters was on screen, I was a happy man.

On the complete opposite end of the starpower spectrum, we have Miles Caton. Sinners is Caton’s feature debut, and despite acting alongside big names like Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, this guy just might steal the show. He impresses with his voice and guitar skills as well as his believable and likable performance, so I can’t wait to see where his career goes from here.

All of those great elements carry Sinners for the first half of its runtime, and at around the midway point or so, the movie switches gears. Granted, the change is nowhere near as abrupt and dramatic as From Dusk Till Dawn, but it goes from leaning heavily towards straight-up drama to going all-in on the horror.

And as I’m sure you can guess, that horror is fantastic. These aren’t the cool, sexy bloodsuckers we’ve gotten used to over the past two or three decades, and when the sun shines on them, they definitely don’t sparkle. They’re much closer to 30 Days of Night than Twilight, so if you like your vampires to be indisputably evil and soaked in blood, you’re not going to be disappointed.

That being said, I do have to give one caveat. Like a lot of contemporary vampire fare, Sinners isn’t exactly scary. Sure, this film has a couple of genuinely hair-raising moments, but for the most part, it favors action, creepy visuals, and gore over outright frights. It’s a pretty good mix in my opinion, so if you’re a horror fan, I think you’re going to enjoy the cornucopia of terror Ryan Coogler has conjured up.

Next, I want to say a few words about the themes of this film. Most obviously, Sinners deals with racism, but not in the way you might expect. See, the story doesn’t outright tell us that racism is wrong. Rather, it simply assumes racism is wrong, so you never feel like the movie is beating you over the head with a message everybody already agrees with.

The way I see it, the real message of this film is about music. There’s a line that says certain people’s music can “conjure spirits from the past and the future” (it’s also in one of the trailers), and Sinners hammers that point home in some amazing ways. Most obviously, there are a couple of scenes that explicitly show music bringing together people of different cultures, places, and even times, and on a meta level, the movie as a whole does that as well.

I already told you how great the score is, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. A lot of the characters in Sinners are musicians, and when they show off their skills, you’d be hard-pressed not to get a big smile on your face. Sometimes it’s blues, and other times it’s traditional European tunes, but whatever the genre, the music these people play is truly beautiful. It’s sure to please the vast majority of people who see this film, regardless of their culture or age, so like I said, Sinners as a whole embodies its message about the power of music.

On top of that, these two main themes of music and racism also intersect in a great way. The connection is very subtle throughout most of the movie, so if you leave when the credits begin to roll, you might not catch it. It only comes to the fore during the mid-credits stinger, so if you do give this film a watch, I highly recommend that you stay for that bonus scene. Granted, it doesn’t add much to the story, but on a thematic level, it enhances the experience quite a bit.

Last but not least, I have to mention a few issues I had with Sinners. To begin, there are a couple of brief sex scenes that don’t serve much purpose. To be fair, they’re not terribly explicit, and they never last very long, so they don’t take too much away from the movie. But their gratuitous nature is a real bummer, so they did chip away at my enjoyment a tiny bit.

More egregiously, the film’s treatment of Christianity is very typical of modern Hollywood. It never explicitly disparages the faith as a whole, but the few times it does mention Christianity, the connotations are largely negative. In particular, the only clearly committed Christian in this story is a pastor who thinks blues music is evil, and there’s at least one scene that highlights the way Christianity has at times been forced on unwilling converts.

Admittedly, there are people who abuse and twist the faith in those (and similar) ways, so I don’t have an issue with those particular criticisms per se. The problem is the lack of balance. More to the point, it's the pervasive lack of balance in American cinema. It seems like Hollywood movies today intentionally highlight the bad in Christians while completely ignoring the good, and Sinners continues that frustrating trend.

Thankfully though, those two problems aren’t nearly enough to ruin the entire film. On the whole, the good in Sinners far outweighs the bad, so this is hands down one of the best movies of the year so far. I don’t think it quite reaches the top spot on my list (that honor probably still belongs to There’s Still Tomorrow), but it’s at least number two. I could even see it becoming a genre classic in the not-too-distant future, so if this sounds like something you’d enjoy, I highly recommend giving it a watch.