Ryan Coogler’s Sinners: A Bloody, Blues-Soaked Fever Dream

Jack O'Connell as Remmick

Ryan Coogler has always been a filmmaker with range — Creed gave us grit, Black Panther gave us a world, but Sinners? Sinners gives us a séance.

It’s a genre-bending, blood-dripping, Mississippi Delta gothic that plays like a gangster epic colliding headfirst with a fever dream. Imagine Al Capone doing business with Dracula at a juke joint in 1932, and you’re halfway there.

At its core are the twin performances of Michael B. Jordan — yes, both Smoke and Stack. This is not just stunt casting; this is full embodiment.

Michael B.Jordan was meticulous in his portrayal, allowing you to be fully immersed in the world. The distinction was clear as day. Smoke carries the haunted weight of a man who’s seen too much, while Stack struts through the frame with silk-shirt swagger.

Jordan makes them feel like brothers with history and hurt in their bones. It’s magnetic, like watching grief and charm play a dangerous duet.

Michael B. Jordan as Smoke

The real monsters aren’t just the sharp-fanged vampires skulking in the Delta shadows. The bigger horrors are Jim Crow, white supremacy, and generational trauma. Coogler turns vampirism into a metaphor, using bloodlust as a chilling stand-in for the insidious, consuming nature of systemic racism. It’s horror with a pulse that’s historical, cultural, and terrifyingly real. It speaks to the haunting cycle of cultural theft — where Black creativity becomes a lifeblood siphoned off, the dominant culture drinking from it like a restless vampire, feeding while giving nothing back.

Miles Caton as Sammie

The supporting cast only deepens the groove. Newcomer Miles Caton makes an electrifying debut as Sammie, a blues prodigy whose music doesn’t just soundtrack the film — it summons it. Wunmi Mosaku brings smoke and fire as Smoke’s estranged wife, and Hailee Steinfeld delivers a quietly devastating performance as a biracial woman passing in a world that wants to erase her. Their chemistry with Jordan feels messy, lived-in, and human — which makes the violence that follows hit even harder.

Visually, the film is couture horror. Coogler teams with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw to paint the Delta in sweat, shadows, and supernatural shimmer. One moment it’s sweltering fields, the next, it’s candlelit sawmills dripping with dread. The final act explodes into a balletic bloodbath — part gangster shootout, part gothic opera.

And Ludwig Göransson’s score? Blues riffs braided with spirituals and orchestral moans— it feels less like a soundtrack and more like the film’s restless ghost.

“ Blues wasn’t forced in us like that religion. We brought this with us home. It’s magic what we do"

Delroy Lindo as Delta Slim

A quote from Delta Slim played by Delroy Lindo that perfectly encapsulates the importance of the blues not only in the movie but culturally.

The blues functions as a praxis of imaginative liberation, converting conditions of unbearable reality into aesthetic expression. Lindo’s performance, in which he resists the collapse into grief by channelling affect into song, exemplifies this radical gesture: the transformation of fracture and dispossession into a resonant mode of cultural production.

Jack O'Connell as Remmick

Remmick portrayed by Jack O’Connell is the perfect villain that really drives forward the vampirism nature of white supremacy while positioning himself as a salvific figure — ‘I am your way out. This world already left you for dead. Won’t let you build. Won’t let you fellowship. We will do just that. Together. Forever.’ Yet, much like many so-called ‘allies’ who align themselves with and profit from Black art, his actions ultimately serve his own interests. His posture reveals a failure to apprehend the profound cultural, historical, and affective significance of the music he seeks to appropriate. In this sense, his engagement operates as extraction rather than solidarity, exemplifying the parasitic logic by which dominant cultures commodify Black creativity without bearing its burdens. Or, as the well-known phrase circulating within African American communities declares: ‘They want our rhythm but not our blues.’”

“Sinners is about the power of culture to turn suffering into something redemptive it’s about when systems of justice and freedom fail, art becomes the last sight of resistance “ - Jared Bauer

All in all, Sinners is a masterpiece. Further solidifying the theory that whenever Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan unite, the unexplainable happens.

Our Verdict: