Film Review: Sinners (2025)
Title: Sinners
Director: Ryan Coogler
Genre: Horror, Drama
Format: Streaming
Available on HBOMax
Amongst endless remakes and sequels, Sinners is fresh, new, and with more depth than most – easily the strongest new horror film of the year, if not the decade. It follows twins, Shake and Stack, who return to their home in the Mississippi Delta to open a juke club staffed by their friends and loved ones. But this is 1932, and the Klan has a plan for the twins and their club. What neither group expects is the arrival of a strange Irishman with reflective eyes and skin that burns in the sunlight.
Sinners is sharply written with a strong eye towards setting. It simmers and wanders like the Delta itself, building momentum by creating buy-in around our characters who are the core of the movie. Michael B. Jordan and newcomer Miles Caton are our stars, and they lead with a perfect balance of gravitas and grounded-ness. Caton, a musician in real life, has something different and special about him. It’s easy to believe his blues performance could summon something otherworldly – the scene where he first performs at the club is one of cinema’s recent masterpieces.
All the actors in this movie brought something substantial to the plate, but I enjoyed Delroy Lindo’s portrayal of Delta Slim and Wunmi Mosaku as Annie the most. Slim brings a much-needed humor to the film which burns through his character all the way to the end. Mosaku as Annie, a spiritualist, gives our characters the tools they need to fight to stay alive until dawn. She is calm, collected, and sensual, a perfect match for the tireless energy of Michael B. Jordan. If writer-director, Ryan Coogler, were to revisit this cinematic universe, I’d love a whole movie about Annie. She was the most deeply embodied character in the movie, and I came to root for her over all others.
Sinners feels like a southern gothic family saga in the first act, becomes spiritual and folkloric in the second, then breaks into action and gore in the third. The gore is unsettling but nowhere near as unsettling as the themes of the movie, which revolve around colonialism, white supremacy, and cultural appropriation. For this reason, it is far more painful than your average horror movie. The audience feels the weight of not just what is happening on screen but what has happened to Black folks time and again with no consequence for centuries.
Coogler likes to sum up his themes in a beautiful and poignant way near the end of his movies. Usually, in just a few lines. Michael B. Jordan delivers this to us in Sinners post-credits, in a scene that wraps the entire movie up in a deeply emotional way. The context, the depth, and weight of the moment were enough to make me sob.
Sinners has the emotional depth and atmosphere of Eve’s Bayou combined with the eerie, more subtle candlelight-action of Midnight Mass. Coogler really never misses, but this movie – undefinable, refusing to be categorized or back down in its message – is his most creative and ingenious. 5/5.
Review By Chelsea Catherine
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