A Self-Defeating Genre Mashup: On Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025)

By Thomas M. Puhr.

Coogler’s strong character work in the film’s first half undercuts his efforts to embrace pure horror in its second.”

Spoiler Alert

Ryan Coogler’s knack for bringing a humanist touch to a variety of genres—starting with social realism (Fruitvale Station), transitioning to crowd-pleasing sports sagas (Creed), and reaching new levels of critical and popular attention with superhero blockbusters (the Black Panther saga)—continues with the musical drama-cum-gorefest Sinners. That a major studio would bankroll such an ambitious venture—one not based on a videogame or comic book, no less—is cause for celebration in and of itself. And the genre mashup, when done well, can be uniquely thrilling; think Alan Parker’s Angel Heart or, more recently, Zoë Kravitz’s Blink Twice. But Sinners’ vision ultimately lacks the consistency of these examples. As a drama, it’s exceptional; as an exercise in terror employing social commentary, middling. Ironically enough, Coogler’s strong character work in the film’s first half undercuts his efforts to embrace pure horror in its second.

A reliably charming Michael B. Jordon pulls double duty as “Smoke” and “Stack,” twin brothers who, after a legendary sojourn in Chicago (rumor has it they worked for Al Capone), return to their hometown in Jim Crow–era Mississippi. Their goal: to use some newly (and suspiciously) acquired riches to turn an abandoned sawmill into a juke joint. The beginning of Sinners, then, follows the classic “Let’s put on a show!” framework, with the brothers preparing for opening night by assembling the crew: Smoke’s old flame, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), to cook; general store owners Bo (Yao) and Grace (Li Jun Li) Chow, to work the bar and register; the lumbering Cornbread (Omar Miller), to man the front door; and, most importantly, Smoke and Stack’s young cousin, Sammie (a revelatory Miles Caton), to play the blues with the help of his guitar and deep, resonant voice. Throw in Hailee Steinfeld as Stack’s ex-girlfriend, Delroy Lindo as a pianist with a troubled past, and Jayme Lawson as a young singer who catches Sammie’s eye, and you have enough secondary characters for two movies.

Coogler, thankfully, takes his time with these characters, getting us to actually feel something for (most of) them before their bodies start to pile up. Viewers eager for the arterial blood to start hitting the fan may find their patience tested by Sinners’ first act, but some naturalistic dialogue and the actors’ uniformly fine work make the calculated risk of an exposition-heavy opening more than pay off. For example, the simplistic characterization suggested by the brothers’ first appearance—Smoke is the steely businessman, Stack the fast-talking charmer—gives way to a much more nuanced dynamic. We learn of the unbearable grief Smoke carries over the child he and Annie lost; when he visits her at their old home, he bitterly asks why the magic she practices couldn’t save their baby. And we learn of the feelings Stack still harbors for Mary (Steinfeld), who is passing and married to a white man; when she reveals that this was Stack’s idea, we sympathize with a man who pushed his love away so she could have the life he knew he could never provide. And this is all not to mention Sammie—the true heart and soul of Sinners—who dreams of escaping the South (and his devoutly religious father, the town pastor) and making it big as a musician in Chicago.

The unhurried opening act allows some of the secondary characters to breathe, too. Lindo in particular nearly steals the show as Delta Slim. When we first meet him, playing harmonica for spare change at a train station, Slim seems to be little more than a one-dimensional archetype—namely, the comic relief–providing (and inevitably self-sacrificing) town drunk with a heart of gold. One scene, however, takes a wrecking ball to this cliché and should remind viewers why Lindo is one of the great American character actors. In it, Slim delivers a monologue about a fateful night from his youth. After he and a friend made a small fortune playing music at a party for white people, his friend was accused of being a thief, robbed just as he was about to leave town for good, and lynched. I can’t help but suspect that if Sinners were trimmedto a multiplex-friendly 100 minutes, this would be the kind of scene—quiet, devastating, interested in more than propelling the plot forward—that would see the cutting room floor.

Even after his cast gathers in the juke joint, Coogler holds off on introducing his horror subplot, instead treating audiences to an extended performance by Sammie and Slim that features some of the writer-director’s most audacious visuals. As Sammie stirs his audience into a near-frenzy, Black musicians both past (ancestral drum circles) and future (a heavy-metal guitarist, a DJ) appear in the club and contribute their own musical stylings. The sequence is truly surprising, practically daring cynical viewers to laugh at it. The presence of these unexpected guests—their sonic mashup collectively embodying a narrator’s earlier claim that music is magic, that it can dissolve the nebulous barrier separating the past and present, the living and the dead—is far more shocking (and exhilarating) than that of the drooling, red-eyed vampires who soon come knocking.

I would much rather have seen Coogler wrestle with the implications of Stack’s suggestion than settle for a patently happy (albeit intermittently surprising) ending, or to have seen him lavish the same amount of care on the film’s horror portion as he did on its first half.”

That’s right: Did I mention Sinners is also a vampire flick, complete with a garlic taste-testing bit that nods to The Thing’s petri dish sequence, wooden stakes being rammed through various squib-loaded chests, and ghouls bursting into flames when exposed to the sun? When three creepy white locals—Joan (Lola Kirke), Bert (Peter Dreimanis), and leader Remmick (a scenery-chewing Jack O’Connell)—appear and seem suspiciously incapable of crossing the bar’s threshold without an explicit invite, the “Let’s put on a show!” device gives way to a From Dusk Till Dawn–style “Survive until the morning” one. Those engrossed by the opening section’s humanist drama and those who have waited an hour for something scary to happen may find themselves equally disappointed by this genre switch-up, but—as someone who ranks Ben Wheatley’s Kill List among the best films of the 2010s—I’m always game for a boldly executed, arguably bizarre tonal shift. I take issue, then, not with the fact that Sinners becomes a horror movie but that the horror movie it becomes just isn’t that good.

Part of the problem is that most of the supernatural aspects—besides one or two genuinely chilling shots, such as an abrupt cut from Remmick just as he takes flight—come across as rushed afterthoughts. The final showdown between the survivors in the juke joint and the growing band of vampires, for example, is over before it really gets started; instead of exploring the bar’s space with the same visual panache they brought to the abovementioned musical number, Coogler and director of photography Autumn Durald Arkapaw mostly confine the action to a short burst of violence within the main hall. And a climactic fight between Smoke and Stack bears all the frenetic editing and difficult-to-parse movement of any paint-by-the-numbers smackdown from an Avengers movie. With one eye trained, perhaps, on sequel potential, Coogler also does a little world building (a band of vampire-hunting Native Americans come and go, Remmick expresses a passing interest in Sammie’s music and its ability to commune with the dead), but I wonder if his villains would have been scarier if they just showed up, without all the perfunctory lore to deprive them of their central mystery.     

The most damaging shortcoming of Sinners’ second half, however, is that Coogler loves Smoke and Stack so much that he hesitates to let anything bad to happen to them. Both brothers may die, for instance, but neither really dies: Smoke is killed during a bloody shootout, but only after we learn that Annie and his child are waiting for him in the afterlife (the ease with which his earlier spiritual skepticism is laid to rest is a little too convenient); Stack becomes one of the undead, but only after Mary is also bitten, thus allowing the couple to remain young, sexy, and smitten for all eternity. If the literal death of a bullet to the stomach or the figurative one of a fang to the neck are equally harmless in the long run, then where are the emotional stakes? Why should we care who lives or dies, who’s bitten or not bitten, if all roads unambiguously lead to salvation? (In this sense, Sinners subscribes to the Mike Flanagan school of tempering down the horror genre’s inherent, essential brutality with a hefty dose of schmaltz.[i]) Taken together, the brothers’ fates (I’ll refrain from spoiling what becomes of young Sammie) feel akin to a cinematic denial of death—one made all the more disappointing when contrasted with scenes like Slim’s monologue.

Nevertheless, the film’s horror section is not without its surprises, half-baked though they may be. At one point, Stack tempts his brother to join him, claiming that life as a vampire allows him the kind of freedom that he and Smoke, as Black men living under Jim Crow, could only dream about. It’s a fascinating idea, one that is explored more in an oddly placed mid-credits sequence than it is anywhere in the film proper. It’s too bad; I would much rather have seen Coogler wrestle with the implications of Stack’s suggestion than settle for a patently happy (albeit intermittently surprising) ending, or to have seen him lavish the same amount of care on the film’s horror portion as he did on its first half. In this respect, it’s hard not to see Sinners as something of a missed opportunity, with Coogler’s ambition only taking him so far.

Note

[i] Of course, one may argue that Sinners’redemptive spiritualism is in keeping with the essential role faith played among some Black communities during Jim Crow. After all, just look at the film’s title. My point, though, is that Coogler doesn’t satisfactorily square this sociocultural reality with the various horror tropes in which he indulges.

Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.