Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” starring Michael B. Jordan, has gained something of a reputation as a bombshell for the 2025 film season, with profits continuing into the second weekend of its theatrical release. Cinephiles can use a good sleeper hit in 2025, and nothing says that more like a movie about vampires taking over a juke joint in 1930s Mississippi. Coogler, who directed movies like “Creed” and “Black Panther,” is doing more than just a straightforward action/horror film.
The plot tells the story of a young preacher’s son named Sammie, who plays guitar blues, and how his cousins took him under their wing for an opening night at their new juke joint. Sammie’s ability to capture blues serves as a “leitmotif” in the movie; he is a “griot”, or a folk musician, whose performance of the blues is “so true it transcends the vale, separating the living from the dead.”
Unfortunately for Sammie’s cousins and their friends, this ability also attracts a trio of vampires and their attempts to take them. Sammie’s cousins, twins “Smoke” and “Stack” Moore, are susceptible prey for the vampires. The twin brothers also have shared burdens, including a criminal connection to Capone’s Chicago and service in the First World War that tortured them throughout the movie. Michael B. Jordan plays a double role as both Smoke and Stack, managing to give both characters a distinctive personality.
Jordan is helped here by Coogler’s adroit screenplay, which makes a clear difference between the brothers, a difficult feat with two roles played by the same actor. Smoke is the more ruthless of the two, shooting a pair of petty criminals who try stealing beer from the back of his truck. Yet, Smoke is also the more emotionally burdened brother, as the viewer realizes when he visits his wife, Annie, who lives by the grave of their dead child. Moreover, Smoke is conflicted about the nature of spiritual folk practices, especially since Annie is passionately in favor of them.
When the vampires reveal their presence, Annie is the one who has the spiritual knowledge to fight them, using holy water and wooden stakes as well as silver bullets. Interestingly, Annie’s Hoodoo bags are also repellent to the vampires with Coogler’s screenplay continually blurring the lines between conventional vampire fighting lore and African American folk spirituality.
Indeed, Sammie’s blues playing is associated with folk spirituality in an extended surreal sequence where musicians from the future and the past join him in a performance, all unbeknownst to Sammie’s audience. Sammie’s music is the blues, and his aforementioned ability attracts the vampires who are trapped between the world of the living and the dead. To them, Sammie is the doorway to bringing their loved ones into their undead world. Either way, Coogler’s “Sinners” places an unmistakable emphasis on the blues as a spiritual art form.