‘Sinners’ Review – Ryan Coogler Bites Into Black Freedom With His Audacious, Blood-Soaked Vampire Flick

What does it mean to be well and truly free?

That is one of the central questions in Ryan Coogler’s work, particularly through a Black lens. Fruitvale Station, Creed, and his Black Panther films all explore the boundaries of living and moving while Black. He examines how internal and external forces – police brutality, generational legacy, and self-imposed isolation – can either push people forward or hold them back. Ironically, his works to date impose their limits on how far he can go in his ruminations. Oscar Grant’s real-life circumstances bind Fruitvale Station, while Creed and Creed II must reconcile the fictional guidelines of Sylvester Stallone’s original character. As incredibly successful as Coogler has been within the Marvel ecosystem, its strict parameters and duties to canon and continuity will always restrict his storytelling within Wakanda’s borders.

Sinners, then, is meant to be a leap forward for Coogler’s autonomy as a storyteller. The film, his first since 2022’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, is a wholly original story he wrote, free from IP and biographical restrictions. Set in the 1930s, it follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) returning to Mississippi after years of living in Chicago to open a juke joint. Each brother has unique motivations for the venture and complicated pasts they want to move beyond, which clash with their neighbors, family, and loved ones. Unbeknownst to them at first, those clashes pale compared to the arrival of Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish vampire who seeks the town’s submission to his bloodthirsty impulses and, ultimately, annihilation. The juke joint’s opening night becomes a vicious, violent battle for supremacy and survival against the darkness creeping along the edges.

Sinners feels like an unguarded, unbound Ryan Coogler. He has complete control here, and you feel his excitement as he pushes his storytelling interests to their logical extremes. He experiments with the tools at his disposal – movement, tone, pacing, sound – to achieve a lyrical, musical approach to his direction. The film moves elegantly through space and time while still evoking overwhelming emotions and atmospheres, from the intense serenity of a Black church to the ravenous carnality of the dance floor. He takes huge structural and tonal swings: he shifts from the relatively relaxed slice-of-life first act to the subsequent jaw-dropping violence, and unabashedly blurs fantasy and reality. He skips across genres with abandon, uninterested in settling into one defined category. He seeks the audience’s trust, and you sometimes question Coogler’s endgame. However, his worldbuilding is so immersive, vibrant, and unique that you know the buildup will be worth it.

That trust pays stellar dividends, as unguarded, unbounded Coogler uses the vampire mythos to sledgehammer his way through the meaning of freedom, specifically for Black people and others of color. While comparatively languid, the first act defines freedom for the Smokestack twins, their blues-playing cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), and their loved ones. Freedom takes many forms for them: economic prosperity, creative expression, shameless sexuality, escape from tragedy, and familial love. However, they know that freedom is incompatible with the violent racism that pervades their lives. The film proposes solutions. Religion, a longstanding pillar of Blackness, is one, although Sammie bristles at how it stifles his musicianship. The closest anyone comes to true liberation is through Sammie’s music, which Coogler conceives as a spiritual bacchanal incorporating the past, present, and future of Black and Asian identity. It is a jaw-dropping display, likely one of the year’s most memorable cinematic moments.

And there are the vampires. 

Vampires have long served as metaphors for society’s greatest trespasses, often related to bigotry and sex. With Sinners, Coogler evolves the metaphor by presenting vampirism as a path to freedom and community. Remmick’s treatise is compelling, especially when compared to the Klu Klux Klan’s inevitable, persistent violence. After all, what are virulent bigots to the gluttonous, sex-crazed undead? Not much, but that doesn’t mean that blood-drinking is liberation. As Coogler demonstrates in unsparing and ferocious fashion, vampires have their own shackles. You might think, then, that there is no liberation, that Blackness is an inherently damned existence. To Coogler, Blackness is not monolithic, and Black freedom is an individualist concept. Every character chooses their freedom, and Coogler finds profundity and validity in each choice. It’s an audacious, hopeful statement, made more stunning in its emergence from equally audacious carnage.

In truth, Coogler doesn’t outright abandon familiarity to achieve his original vision. Sinners continues his fruitful partnership with Michael B. Jordan, who shepherds us through Coogler’s blood-soaked vision. Like Coogler, Jordan is similarly unleashed, delivering his most nakedly charismatic performance. He resists the urge to wildly deviate between Smoke and Stack, instead foregrounding their similarities and teasing out their differences. Jordan is methodical, efficient, and ruthless with Smoke, while Stack allows him to be reckless, crass, funny, and exciting. What links them is a powder-keg tension borne from years of shouldering brutality, and Jordan carries it throughout the film to remind everyone that he can ignite at any moment. The cast is uniformly strong, but Wumni Mosaku is a spiritual force of nature, challenging and calming Jordan’s potent screen presence with uncompromising grace and conviction in her eyes and movements on screen.

Coogler may only be 12 years into his feature filmmaking career, but Sinners feels like the film he was destined to make. It is a swaggering, staggering magnum opus that methodically chips away at the borders of Blackness to posit a new path while giving credit to past ones forged for survival. Coogler has much on his mind with this film, and he presents so many ideas that it may be impossible to parse through them all in one sitting. It helps that Sinners is such a sleek, sexy, and bold cinematic experience that is thoroughly engaging instead of overwhelming and alienating. This film solidifies Coogler as one of the most vital voices in filmmaking today, whether he is restricted or, preferably, free.

Sinners will debut exclusively in theaters on April 18, 2025, courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.