Sinners
First screened and reviewed in May 2025
Director: Ryan Coogler. Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Wunmi Mosaku, Hailee Steinfeld, Delroy Lindo, Saul Williams, Omar Miller, Yao, Li Jun Li, Jayme Lawson, Jack O'Connell, David Maldonado, Lola Kirke, Peter Dreimanis, Tenaj L. Jackson, Andrene Ward-Hammond, Mark L. Patrick, Buddy Guy. Screenplay: Ryan Coogler. In Brief:
I dig the reach and the levels of risk, even if I think style and form are relative disappointments. Writing also uneven.
VOR:⑤
Shoots for the stars in its historical address, communal imaginary, and confounded genres. Execution not always nimble, but fearsome goals.
Sinners feels like Gaspar Noé's Climax reimagined as one of those black Southern folktales that Zora Neale Hurston gathered up and zhuzhed a little during her anthropological research quests. That, plus a little and then a lot of From Dusk Till Dawn—an odd combo if also an exciting one, and it could have worked! The first two-thirds, anyway. But Sinners just kept finding new ways to disappoint me, and good will eventually wore out, even before the movie's bizarre, listless profusion of limp endings.
For what felt like the first hour, I was engaged thematically but not rhythmically. That whole Lazy Susan of character introductions felt so lumpy and pedestrian, even as I was curious enough about these people and their world to keep following them. That's especially true if they're played by strong, slippery, cliché-resistant, endlessly resourceful Delroy Lindo, who absolutely cannot be blamed for making every other performance look pretty tepid. I also reacted badly to the lighting and camera work almost from the beginning. Why are all the faces so smudgy and dark in that church-aisle prologue? (That scene already would have been much more powerful at half the length, sort of like Killer of Sheep's elliptical, razor-cut intro.) Why is so much of this movie dominated by cross-cut and shot/reversed closeups of someone talking in the middle of an ill-used widescreen frame? Creed remains Coogler's only inarguably well-lensed movie, and after this and Wakanda Forever, I just don't see what he does in Autumn Arkapaw's photography.
Around the middle, I got thematically and also structurally excited. This feeling didn't last long, but for a very promising few minutes, it looked like several of our key characters, all people of color, found themselves in a double-trouble situation where bloodthirsty threat existed both outside their fortified juke joint (in the form of white Irish vampires) and inside that fortified juke joint (in the form of newly converted, black and racially ambiguous vampires). Sinners had managed to elaborate a scenario in which antagonism takes the form of both a ferociously bifurcated racial/political/historical structure AND a universal, metaphysical potential for malignancy and harm that can bloom inside any person, any community. As flat as many of these characters had become by this juncture, I was keen to watch how they and the movie would negotiate this life-or-death, dual-front conundrum, and I hoped the script and the filmmaking might capitalize at last on several murmured insinuations that at least some of the villainy was coming from inside the music itself. What might that look or feel like on screen? What might that mean?
Then we get the last hour, which defaults almost completely to White People Are Vampires, or at least the source of all vampirism. Which, sure. The prosecutor confidently rests his case. And also....yawn? Or at least, a lot easier than the three-dimensional chessboard that the Sinners script seemed ready to explore. Forget that, we're just gonna tic-tac-toe this shit. Actors who'd showed early potential (Jordan, Caton, Mosaku, Li) start looking shakier, and those who've felt uncertain throughout (Steinfeld, omg Lawson) really look exposed. That absolutely lumbering camera and shooting style—which only rarely feel attuned to the energies and generic needs of a quasi-musical, or to the silent telegraphies of actorly body language—look just as rigid and dramatically under-motivated when it's time for supernatural baddies to start leaping through the air and gorging on necks.
By the end I was neither rhythmically nor thematically engaged. The movie seemed to have taken the easiest, thinnest route through its historical, cross-racial, cross-cultural scenario. There's all the warrant in the world to want to go full Inglourious Basterds on a small battalion of Klansmen, but it also feels distinctly like a massive lowering of the bar of ambition. An ornate exercise in eccentric world-building, just like Inception, that's suddenly an iffily edited, indifferently scripted movie about people shooting each other, just like Inception. (I'm not surprised in the least ro see the Nolan-Thomases billed so prominently in the Thank You's.) A movie that seemed to promise a lot of multivalent social tapestry and interesting moral gray area is just clinging to the wall at the shallowest end of the pool. And the overbright lighting of all this tommygun play does barely more favors for Hannah Beachler's production design or Ruth Carter's costumes than the lugubrious, inelegant darkness that preceded them. A movie protesting the ceaseless gravitational pull of American violence by this point feels like just another rote, sensationalist wallow in American violence. And then poor B**** G** gets trotted out to lend this disjointed exercise in speculative historical fiction some unearned iconographic weight.
I'm happy for the people who got more out of this one than I did, but my expectations for craft and for story were nowhere near met. And it's a weird moment in history to be leaning so hard on 360° Bloodbath as the prevailing idiom in popular entertainment. As happened in Wakanda Forever, I'm a little worried about the limits in Coogler's ethical vision (even as it's clear that Sinners is trying, however ham-fistedly, to muddy some too-clean moral waters), and I wonder if America will ever find a lingua franca for homegrown lore that isn't just ammo, impalement, incineration, and bursting arteries. Grade:B–
