Sinners (2025)

Rated R for all kinds of horror movie stuff.  Besides the fact that this is a pretty brutal vampire movie (which is a good thing!), the movie also gets pretty graphic when it gets to sex, even though I don't remember any nudity in the film.  As good genre cinema is wont to do, the film goes into challenging content.  In this case, the movie tackles issues of race, which brings some pretty hateful content with it.  R.

DIRECTOR:  Ryan Coogler

You guys need to stop overhyping movies for me.  I don't deny that Sinners is incredible.  It absolutely is a top tier vampire horror film.  I don't think I'll have anything negative to say in this blog.  But do you understand how I was expecting transcendence?  Everyone kept saying how Sinners was one of the greatest movies that they've ever seen and I don't even know if it will make the greatest films of 2025.  Do you understand how petty that makes me sound?  I know it's a great movie.  I have no notes.  I still don't love it and it's all your faults.

Like many of the blogs I write, this thing is going to go pretty stream of consciousness.  Sometimes I go with with a strategy.  But Coogler does his all to really cover his bases.  Maybe this is going to be a commentary on cinema as a whole.  See, most of the classics we talk about have a lot to unpack.  But Coogler brings a lot to think about...but he unpacks a lot of it for us.  It feels like anything I talk about will be fairly obvious when it comes to it.  That's the thing about vampire stories.  Vampires tend to be really good when it comes to Monster Theory.  (I used Monster Theory for my master's thesis.  It's been a minute, so I apologize for the lack of detail when it comes to explaining this.  From what I remember --and became a mild expert at --is that what monsters and villains we choose for genre storytelling tends to reflect concerns within contemporary culture.)  Vampires have always been kind of amazing stand-ins for societal fears.  I mean, Dracula is about the fear of the immigrant.  But the vampires in Sinners outright tell us what we have to fear.

In the case of Remmick, he voices the fears that Stack has when it comes to the Klan.  I actively love how vampires in Sinners become one hive mind because it makes them far more attractive as the story progresses.  Remmick, when we first meet him, is kind of pathetic.  He's on the run from the indigenous people.  He's collapsing over himself and only finds shelter with the Klan.  When he converts the bigots, he teaches them music and these two slugs become appealing to the juke when they can perform as well as Remmick.  When Remmick gets a hold of Mary, he abuses his role as ally to begin slaughtering the survivors of the juke one-by-one.  I mean, it takes the characters a lot of effort to trust Mary enough to be allowed into the juke.  The initial fear, before the vampire stuff, is that Mary is going to abuse her role as White ally to bring down the juke.  It's Smoke and Stack's joined fear, that Mary is not good for business.  But when she is allowed in, there's always the fear that she's going to bring the whole place down.  But when Remmick learns what it means to be an ally, instantly we have a White people abusing the privilege of being allies to start killing everyone. 

And Remmick becomes a very different seduction than Dracula does. If Dracula's appeal is debauchery, Remmick's seduction is progress.  The movie takes place in the '30s post WWI.  While I'm sure that there was a temptation from Coogler's perspective to make the movie during slavery, he wisely places the film in the '30s, reminding America that life has never been easy for Black people.  While the characters live in a town mostly segregated from White people, there are vestiges of slavery all around them.  Most of the characters are sharecroppers and pick cotton for a living.  The land has enslaved them as has the agricultural industry.  So when Remmick confesses that Hogwood is the Grand Wizard of the Klan and that the juke was never a permanent institution, there's a temptation from the survivors' perspective that vampirism would not only give them equality, it would also grant them with the first advantage that they had in their lives.

I won't lie.  When that Klan confession shows up, that desire for immortality seemed like a pretty good deal.  But the format of Sinners doesn't really let us sit with that temptation.  (I suppose the end gives us a little hope that there is some humanity when it comes to vampires, but that's more of a fun post-script for the characters of Preacherboy and Stack rather than a commentary on the role of temptation.)  The real takeaway is that progress is hard, but achievable.  While watching Smoke completely wreck the Klan in town with a military blitzkrieg, the true point is that Smoke doesn't need to compromise who he is to make change.  Sure, Smoke and Stack are both morally dubious characters in the story, but one of the selling points is that morality doesn't always look the same.  Smoke sacrifices himself to destroy the Klan, upholding the promise that the brothers offered in the first act of the movie.  But the important part is that he is still himself.  There's a second commentary that not all evil lurks at night.  While the conflict of the film is tied to the setting of "night" due to vampirism, there is an expectation that the characters would be safe in the light of day.  However, the Klan operates in both the day and the night.  These Klansmen don't show up in robes.  They don't really need to hide their faces.  Instead, there is the confidence of riding up to the juke in everyday clothing, their faces blazing in the open.  

Okay, there's a love / hate moment in the movie.  Because I love most of it, but I wanted to love it more.  I adore --AFREAKINGDORE --the notion that art and music is a transcendent vehicle for the supernatural.  Absolutely.  For all the people who listed Sinners as their favorite movie of the year because of its fascination with music, I get it.  I completely support your argument and I want you to preach it from the rooftops.  That being said, as well as that scene was filmed --and it was filmed as impressively as it could be --there was something a little corny about it as well.  Maybe that comes with Coogler's need to spell things out for us a bit.  For those who don't know, there's a scene where Preacherboy finally takes the floor and shows that he understands the Blues, even though he's significantly younger than Delta Slim.  Okay, he plays his song and this life-changing moment happens where time rips open and the juke becomes something out of Babylon.  It's all playing in the world of metaphor.  I'll even allow that the movie permits this moment to be literal and nothing changes.  But in this moment, musicians from all over time and geography show up in the juke and we get that there's something unifying about the role of music.  And it's cool...but cool can also be a bit silly.  I was leaning hard into, "This is all just a little bit silly, isn't it?"  Again, conceptually and even executionally, I was impressed.  But in terms of making me fall in love with music, I kept on being, "Come on, brain...love this."  And it just wasn't happening.  It's such a vulnerable moment and I'm sure it tracked for a lot of people.  I just didn't really make that emotional leap that made me fall in love with it.

There's little things that I could complain about.  I don't love that movies only shoot part of the film in IMAX and then release the film with varying aspect ratios.  That didn't do much for me.  But that's so small.  I'm sure if I saw this on an IMAX screen, those moments would have crushed.  But instead, this is just a really good vampire movie that has some cool things to say, but not much to unpack.  I want to love it  more than I do.  Maybe it's because I've seen my fair share of vampire movies and I kept on thinking back to From Dusk Till Dawn, which seems to share a lot of DNA with this film.  Still, it's incredible and I'm down for Coogler to keep making stuff of this caliber.