Gothic Vampire Epic ‘SINNERS’ is the Movie of the Year

There’s an ironic poetry in the fact that it took Ryan Coogler walking away from the MCU — and Marvel quietly shelving Blade — for a Coogler-made vampire film to just appear out of nowhere. And thank God it did, because Sinners is the early contender for best movie of the year. A Gothic Southern vampire tale layered with the legacy of Jim Crow and pulsing to the rhythm of the blues, Sinners is a soulful, thoughtful, sexy, funny, riveting piece of big-ish budget studio filmmaking that actually has something to say. And says it with bloody fanfare. It’s the rare work of a genuine auteur embracing genre thrills while coloring outside the lines of what is expected within that genre, enriching the narrative with real history, spirited music, and undeniable soul. The real thrill of Sinners is in how it balances traditional vampire movie pleasures with embedded deeper ideas, making them textual rather than ornamental.

Ideas about how Blackness is siloed into its own cultural chambers, only to be inevitably infiltrated and commodified by whiteness — and the subtext around the enduring nature of oppression, which, much like an immortal vampire, refuses to die — are all baked into Sinners. On paper, that might sound overly academic or heavy-handed. In practice, it’s anything but. The film weaves all of this together with such swagger and soul that it never once feels like homework. The surface-level craftsmanship and heart-pumping thrills marry so elegantly with the deeper meaning that make it just a joy to behold.

This richness hits its peak in one of the most transcendent sequences I’ve seen on screen in the last decade: late at night, a crowd quiets, a musician crones. The barrier between past, present, and future dissolves under the spell of his music The aspect ratio widens to fill the full IMAX frame. Contemporary style and sound merge with the blues, African hymns, and ancestral garb — Blackness refracted through time. It’s explosive on an audiovisual level, but even more powerful in meaning: a moment that frames music as a mythic medium capable of cutting through time and space, uniting ancestors with their descendants in a shared, spiritual groove.

The shifting aspect ratio gives the moment an operatic sweep, elevated even further by Ludwig Göransson’s soaring score. And that’s true throughout Sinners. There’s so much life in the way the camera moves and how the music breathes with the film. They pulse with one another — images and sound dancing, riding the same soulful swell. Even something as subtle as a still-life tableau of characters staring silently into the lens feels massive on the big screen — intimate yet monumental. A close-up of a devastated soul under Coogler’s penitent gaze.

The decision to shoot simultaneously with Ultra Panavision 70 and IMAX 65 film cameras — a first — gives Coogler the freedom to toggle between the textured grain of analog film and the expansive grandeur of IMAX. In some scenes, you can practically see the grain sparkling, lending the image a glowing, living quality. In others, it blows up right in your face — vivid, hypnotizing, almost overwhelming. Whether he’s filming vampire carnage or quiet moments of daily Southern life, the camera flirts with a kind of romance, even nostalgia, for a time steeped in racial injustice and horror. There’s something provocative, even eerie, in the way Coogler captures sharecroppers working the cotton fields and chain-ganged prisoners tilling the earth in rhythm with their blues — perhaps inoculating us for the more traditional horrors to come by first showing us the casual horrors of the not-so-distant past.

Sinners introduces us to Sammy (Miles Caton), an aspiring blues guitarist and the son of a local clergyman who goes by the moniker “Preacher Boy.” Sammy’s life gets upended when his notorious cousins — the Smokestack Twins (both played by Micahel B. Jordan) — roll back into small-town Mississippi after a seven-year stint working under Al Capone in Chicago. The twins come bearing sin. And not just in the form of prohibited Italian wine and Irish beer stashed in the back of their truck. No, they carry stains on their souls of a darker, more obfuscated nature. Their plan? Open a juke joint — and fast. There’s this idea that their juke will be a safe space for “their people,” a place that feels inherently liminal against the pressures of their time. And they do what they can to preserve that — even if it ends up lasting just one night. The twins waste no time turning their homecoming into a grand opening, winning over the townspeople with promises of debauchery and cold beer. Who amongst us — without sin — could resist?

Coogler’s script wisely invests in the slow burn, setting the scene and giving us a real sense of the people who live here, the lives they lead, and the quiet struggles they carry, before subjecting the whole thing to vampire mayhem. To pull off the perfect opening night, the Smokestack Twins assemble the town’s dream hospitality unit: barkeep and artist Grace (Li Jun Li), cook Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), bouncer Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), and the legendary, perpetually pickled pianist Delta Slim (the legendary Delroy Lindo). Their plan to throw the greatest party their hometown has ever seen is complicated by the arrival of white vampires — led by a snarling but singsong Jack O’Connell — as well as some scorned exes (including Hailee Steinfeld’s magnetic Mary) and a few scheming Klansmen lurking on the margins.

Jordan puts in a truly tremendous effort in a dual role as the twin gangsters, Smoke and Stack. The nuances between the brothers are subtle, teased out through interactions where one is a bit more flexible, the other slightly more hardened. They’re two sides of the same ancient coin — fiercely protective of each other, forged in violence and loyalty, but fundamentally different. The script makes smart work showing us what they mean to each other, and what their notoriety means to the town, without spelling it out in obvious strokes. Jordan is as good as he’s ever been here, channeling the ferocity and physicality he brought to Creed, while also radiating intensity, charm, and an unmistakable dose of sex appeal. It’s the perfect role for him — and we’re lucky to get it twice.

Sexy, raw, and dripping with soul (and blood), Sinners is the kind of movie that happens when a talented director is given free rein to make something that actually matters to him. The epic two-hour-and-seventeen-minute runtime says it all — Coogler loves this material and really sinks his fangs into it. It feels like a labor of love in a way his studio work has only hinted at. Here, the gloves are off. No punches pulled. He’s Creed beating down an opponent out of pure love of the game. And with that commitment to the bit comes smutty, pulpy, adult material that’s unafraid to get messy and meaningful.

Coogler is not beholden to some larger cinematic continuity, and yet he builds a rich universe and mythology of his own with Sinners — one deeply rooted in the 1930s South and embedded in Black cultural history. Yes, the Smokestack Twins must survive a night of vampire assault, but even if they make it through that, they still have to face off against the Klansmen down the street. Perhaps stories of monsters have always been just that: a storybook escape from the true horror that lives just next door. A way to forget that evil doesn’t sport fangs or drink blood — it moves in daylight, under the protection of the law. That’s a horrifying thought indeed.

CONCLUSION: Ryan Coogler delivers a bloody, soulful masterstroke of music-driven genre filmmaking with ‘Sinners’ — a movie that erupts with passionate craft just as much as it surprises with its thematic depth. Michael B. Jordan is tremendous in a dual role, but it’s Coogler and his ability to pull everything together with style, substance, and swagger who truly steals the show.