Sinners: Michael B Jordan's wild Southern Gothic horror is an utterly thrilling oddity

Telegraph

11-04-2025

Ryan Coogler's career has always been teetering on the brink of prestige. Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther: none of these films behaved like classic Oscar bait, exactly, but all three came bundled with enough topicality and substance to ensure that numerous beards were liberally stroked.
Wonderfully, his latest film rocket-blasts his career in the other direction at a million miles an hour: more wonderfully still, it initially has you scrambling to work out what sort of film you're even watching, before finally lighting the ignition with a wink. At first it resembles a handsome period drama – shot on IMAX cameras, no less! – and set in the Prohibition-era Deep South, where candy-floss clouds scud lazily above the sprawling cotton fields.
This apparently ordinary corner of rural Mississippi is where two twin-brother mobsters, both played by Coogler's regular leading man Michael B Jordan, are trying to get a new hustle underway. Using their liquor-running connections from a turbulent spell in Chicago, this effortlessly slick pair, Smoke and Stack, are opening a juke joint in a derelict barn near the home town of their cousin Sammie (newcomer Miles Caton). This wide-eyed youngster is a gifted blues guitarist, and therefore an ideal act for the brothers' opening night. But his preacher father views secular music with suspicion: it's how the devil gets in. Viewers whose brains just lit up with the name 'Robert Johnson' will not leave short-changed.
For a while, we watch the brothers piecing together their venture, with help from a feisty ex-lover (Hailee Steinfeld), the town's shopkeeper Grace (Li Jun Li), a silvering local worthy (Delroy Lindo), and more vibrantly drawn supporting characters. In lieu of monologues and soul-baring, Coogler crams the film with proper movie-star performances at every level: by turns glowingly charismatic, sparklingly funny and silkily seductive.
And then – in more than one sense – the stakes are abruptly raised. It's not quite a spoiler to say that what comes next involves Riverdancing vampires and the most outrageous blood sprays since Toshiro Mifune last unsheathed a samurai sword. But that's because the pleasure of Sinners isn't in watching its plot unfold so much as the visceral experience of feeling it swing from side to side, as it thwangs you round one insane corner and into the next.
As the craziness climbs, Coogler keeps finding ways to squeeze startlingly original ideas into his chosen Southern Gothic format, with its obvious overtones of Salem's Lot. There's an extraordinary moment in which Caton's Sammie takes to the stage and his blues melodies and rhythms somehow pry apart spacetime itself: black musicians from other nations and eras start to drift through the scene, from prog rockers to hip-hoppers and beyond. To experience this level of off-the-wall metaphysical gamesmanship and elevated craft in a film that's primarily a bit of fun is utterly thrilling – as well as (outside of South Korea and Japan, at least) tragically rare. Does Hollywood know that popular films are allowed to behave like this?
Given it almost certainly doesn't, it's all too easy to imagine an alternate version of Sinners in which a blunt racism allegory was mapped onto the plot. But as Jack O'Connell 's Remmick and his fellow-travellers keep insisting, skin colour doesn't really concern them: all that matters is recruiting more souls for the undead revolution, and thereby building a new heaven (albeit a pretty hellish one) right here on earth. Sinners is such a joyous oddity it's easy to wonder if its own revolutionary instincts stand any chance of catching on, but you can't help but wish it every success.
15 cert, 138 min. In cinemas from April 18