Sinners (Warner Bros., Domain Entertainment, Proximity Media, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 23) my husband Charles and I went to the AMC Mission Valley 20 movie theatres to catch Ryan Coogler’s latest film, Sinners. This was the day after the 2026 Academy Award nominations were announced, and Sinners had broken the record for total nominations for a film with 16. I wanted to see Sinners partly because Ryan Coogler is one of the most amazing living filmmaking talents and partly because its subject interests me: Black American culture in general and the blues in particular. AMC obviously viewed Sinners as a straight-out horror film, because the 25 minutes of previews they showed before it were all for standard-issue modern-day horror films, full of blood and gore, whereas Sinners transcended the horror genre much the way Coogler’s Black Panther transcended the conventions of movies based on comic-book superheroes. The film is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi (probably not coincidentally, where Bessie Smith died and John Lee Hooker was born) in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression. It’s centered around three main characters: twins Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan, Coogler’s favorite actor; he’s been in all Coogler’s previous films), and their cousin Sammie Moore (Miles Caton). Smoke and Stack left Mississippi in the teens, fought as infantrymen in World War I, and acquired skills with guns that served them well in Chicago in the 1920’s. Coogler, who wrote his own script as well as directing, isn’t altogether clear what happened to them between 1918 and 1932, but they performed together as a blues-singing duo and also committed crimes, either for themselves or as part of Al Capone’s gang (or both). Now in 1932 they’ve returned home to Clarksdale with a major stash of cash with which they intend to buy a deserted cotton mill and play to turn it into a juke joint.

The film actually starts with a narrated scene explaining the West African concept of the griot (though they pronounce it “GREE-ott” instead of what I’d always assumed it was, “GREE-oh”), the traveling singers who made up their own songs and kept alive the memories and consciousness of the members of the tribe. They buy the old mill from a white creep named Hogwood (Dave Maldonado), who insists on spitting out his chewing tobacco on the floor and leaving them to clean it up. Smoke and Stack ask if there are any members of the Ku Klux Klan, and Hogwood insists that the Klan no longer exists – though we suspect he’s lying because on his bed we see a pile of sheets that looks like a Klan outfit, and much later in the film we learn that there is a Klan chapter in Clarksdale and Hogwood is the leader of it. We also learn that the racial politics of Clarksdale are a bit more complicated than the usual “Black and white” stereotype: the local general store is owned by a Chinese couple, Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), and there’s also at least one Native American (Mark L. Patrick) who tries to warn a local poor-white couple against inviting Remmick (Jack O’Connell) into their home. Alas, they get the warning too late: Remmick shows up looking like a badly burned white guy but he’s really a vampire, and he vampirizes the couple by literally putting the bite on them. The three vampires decide to attack the juke joint, which is having a spectacular grand opening featuring piano player Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson), and Sammie Moore, who has ignored the warnings of his preacher father Jedidiah (Saul Williams, who judging from his imdb.com head shot looks like he’d be good casting for a biopic of Miles Davis) to avoid playing blues because it’s supposedly the music of the devil. Sammie’s extraordinary playing (Coogler required all the actors cast as musicians to do their own singing and playing, and judging from his performance here Miles Caton has a major career ahead of him as both singer and actor) literally summons up spirits of the Black race past, present, and future. We are told this via an amazing sequence set inside the juke joint that flashes us both backwards to the griots we saw in the prologue and forwards to a modern-day D.J. turntable setup as used in traditional rap.

The opening night, at which Smoke’s wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) serves as cook when she isn’t running her store selling voodoo charms and remedies, attracts Stack’s former girlfriend Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), whom he broke up with because she’s only one-quarter Black and presents as white, so he arranged for her to marry a rich white landowner in another town to protect her from the local racists. Mary makes it clear she wants to get back with Stack, while Sammie and Pearline have sex in one of the back rooms of the club and Smoke butt-fucks Annie. Remmick and the Hogwoods show up at the club and demand admittance – as in the 1987 Joel Schumacher film The Lost Boys, the vampires cannot enter the home of a normal human unless they’ve specifically been invited. At first they’re kept out by Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), a local sharecropper whom Smoke and Stack have hired as their bouncer, but when Cornbread has to go outside to pee the vampires attack him and convert him into one of them. Remmick and the other vampires try their damnedest to get into the club, including staging their own mini-concert outside with white folk songs like “The Wild Mountain Thyme,” “Rocky Road to Dublin,” and “Old Corn Liquor.” (I remember most of those songs from my father’s collection of folk-music records.) Ultimately Mary leaves the club, where she’d be safe, and goes outside – where the vampires turn her. Mary attacks and transforms Stack when he lets her in in a vain attempt to save her. Annie makes the people still inside the club eat solid cloves of garlic to make sure none of them have been vampirized. Remmick makes the holdouts an offer he thinks they can’t refuse: they can all become vampires and therefore join a community of absolute equality and zero racism. He really wants Sammie because the unique power of Sammie’s music can summon spirits from the past whom Remmick could add to his cult. Remmick also reveals that Hogwood, the head of the local Ku Klux Klan, plans to attack the juke joint and destroy it. Sammie hits Remmick over the head with his National guitar (supposedly a souvenir of the great Charley Patton but actually the property of Smoke’s and Stack’s father), and the metal plate detaches itself from the body and bisects Remmick’s head.

Smoke gets out a collection of rifles and a Thompson submachine gun and successfully holds off the Klan’s raiding party, though he’s fatally wounded himself. Smoke is able to keep the vampires occupied until sunrise, which incinerates them immediately, and as he’s dying Smoke tells Sammie to return to his father’s church. In a scene that was prefigured in the second half of the prologue (between the griot scene and the ones at the juke joint), Jedediah tells Sammie to drop the broken neck of his guitar, thereby renouncing the evil of the blues and returning to the good fold of Black Christianity. Sammie heads to Chicago and literally becomes Buddy Guy – Coogler cast the veteran blues musician as Sammie’s older incarnation. (I’d seen Buddy Guy’s name on the imdb.com cast list for this film and wondered where and how he’d turn up; I presumed he’d be an older musician either busking on the streets of Clarksdale or playing at the juke joint, but instead Coogler cast him much more creatively than that.) As they’re wrapping up a late-night club set in 1992, the elder Sammie is visited by Stack and Mary, who because they’re vampires have not visibly aged. Once again they offer him immortality and freedom if he’ll consent to become a vampire, and once again he turns them down. The film has a lot of post-credits sequences – anyone who bolted from the theatre as if the onset of the credits were the starting gun of a sprint race missed more than usual – and it ends with a marvelous performance of the gospel standard “This Little Light of Mine” played by Miles Caton as the young Sammie on bottleneck guitar. Sinners is an extraordinary movie, beset by the blood and gore typical of the horror genre as well as a few too many abrupt sound cuts, but mostly quite well made and thematically rich. It occurred to me that had Smoke gone to Jedidiah and mobilized the churchgoers to join him in vanquishing the vampire threat the film could have been even better than it is – then we would have seen the “good” Christian Blacks using the power of their version of African-American music to vanquish both the blues and the white vampires’ version of folk music – though maybe that would have been too much like The Jazz Singer to suit Coogler’s taste.

At first I worried whether I’d be able to accept this film given its seemingly uneasy mix of Black culture and white horror, but (as it had with Black Panther as well), Coogler’s filmmaking mastery overcame whatever reservations I might have had and I was swept along with the sheer energy and thematic richness of his film. I even applauded his name in the closing credits, and a few others in the audience joined me. I also found myself wondering if Coogler had based his script at least in part on the experience of Robert Wilkins, a stunningly talented blues musician of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s who abruptly quit the blues after a mass fight broke out at a juke joint where he was performing. Deciding that the evil of his music had caused the people to riot, Wilkins abruptly quit his blues career and became an itinerant preacher and faith healer. When he returned to music in the early 1960’s it was as a gospel singer, though he rewrote one of his old blues songs, “That’s No Way to Get Along,” to reflect the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son – and in that form the Rolling Stones covered it. There was also the case of Son House (also from Clarksdale, Mississippi), who went in the other direction; at age 25, having already trained for the ministry and pastored churches, he discovered the blues. Within a few years he had fallen so low down the moral totem pole he was serving time at the state’s notorious Parchman Farm prison after he shot and killed another man who was shooting at him in a juke joint. (Had House been white he probably could have successfully pleaded self-defense.) There was also the notorious case of Walter Barnes, who along with virtually his entire band lost his life in a catastrophic ballroom fire in Natchez, Mississippi in 1940 after the band kept playing to keep the rest of the people from panicking. (This incident inspired the invention of crash-bar doors that could be more easily opened in an emergency.)

Coogler himself said that the inspiration for the film came from Willie Dixon’s blues classic “Wang Dang Doodle,” an ode to the juke joints Dixon wrote for blues legend Howlin’ Wolf (true name: Chester Alan Arthur Burnett) in 1960. Dixon once said the title “meant a good time, especially if the guy came in from the South. A wang dang meant having a ball and a lot of dancing, they called it a rocking style so that's what it meant to wang dang doodle.” This explains why there’s the anachronistic performance of “Wang Dang Doodle” early in the juke-joint sequences of Sinners, played by Cedric Burnside, Tierinii Jackson and Sharde Thomas-Mallory in the all-out electric blues style created in the early 1950’s when musicians like Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Elmore James left Mississippi for Chicago and started playing amplified guitars. But this performance was technologically impossible in 1932, when even if the current had been available to power them (one of the cleverest scenes in Sinners shows a man from the club climbing a power pole and plugging in their own cord to turn the lights on), electric guitars as we know them today simply didn’t exist yet. (There’s an ironic reflection of this in the 1992 postlude, in which the vampire couple tell Buddy Guy that they want to hear him play acoustic because they consider that purer.) I could go on and on and on about Sinners and the depths of Ryan Coogler’s imagination – and also my hope that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gives Sinners the Best Picture award Coogler deserved for Black Panther seven years ago. The Golden Globes palmed off Sinners with the so-called “Best Cinematic and Box Office Achievement” award, while giving the Best Motion Picture-Drama award to Hamnet (Chloe Zhao’s “safe” take on the real or imagined life of William Shakespeare) and the Best Motion Picture-Comedy or Musical to One Battle After Another. I haven’t seen either of those films (I have seen Green Book, the film that beat Black Panther for the 2019 Academy Award for Best Picture, and it was a good movie but a typical socially-conscious slice of Hollywood liberalism in which the Black characters exist only to morally redeem the white ones, instead of a film like Black Panther in which the Black characters had real independence and agency), but it’s hard to believe that either of them were made with the depth of imagination, insight, and artistry Ryan Coogler brought to Sinners.