The twins have come home. Years ago, they left for the war in Europe, then money in Chicago, but now they’re back in 1930s Mississippi with a truckload of Irish beer and Italian wine and designs to open up a juke joint in the middle of endless expanses of cotton fields. It’ll be a place “for us, by us,” and it will begin to set right generations of exploitation.

Only, there’s something sinister about the place they just bought and whom they bought it from. Then again, as Sinners plays out, just about everything here has a touch of the sinister.

Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, Sinners is a massive film, shot with IMAX cameras by cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, and incorporates more characters and ideas than three or four run-of-the-mill Hollywood offerings. Wim Wender’s beautiful and unwieldy Until the End of the World came to mind, but that might just be because of a sweater Michael B. Jordan wears at the end of Sinners.

Jordan plays the twins, Smoke and Stack. Stack wears a stylish red broad-brimmed fedora; Smoke a snappy blue pageboy hat. They’re both capable of violence, but the script keeps reversing expectations of which brother is more dangerous. At times, Jordan’s performance seems to slip between the two, but I think that’s the point of the narrative. Smoke and Stack are who they are, but they’ve also learned to be who they pretend to be. The world can make monsters of us all, some more willing than others.

As for the plot, the twins buy an abandoned sawmill to turn into the juke joint and recruit musicians Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) and Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) to provide the music. For supplies and signage, they hire the husband and wife who run the nearby general store, Bo and Grace (Yao and Li Jun Li). For food, Smoke calls on his old flame Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), while Stack’s one-time lover, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), comes looking to reignite an old affair.

There’s also a young singer, Pearline (Jayme Lawson), who lands at the party, and a stranger (Jack O’Connell), who shows up unannounced at a nearby farmhouse asking to be let in while his skin sizzles in the setting sun. A small party of Choctaws pursue the mysterious white man to the house, but skedaddle once evening sets in. They are not the only ones whose future is irreparably altered by the European’s appearance.

Here, Coogler’s two main themes intersect. The stranger is a vampire about to turn a whole mess of unsuspecting people into his followers. Fascinatingly, the spread of vampirism is going to follow along lines of oppression.

Sinners delivers on the vampires and all the bloody carnage that comes with, but Coogler is more interested in Western civilization’s history of taking—taking someone else’s land, time, money, personal effects, even their soul—than a straight-through genre picture. You might not think that a climactic battle between a Black musician and an Irish vampire could also involve a discourse on systemic oppression, but it does. And it does so effectively.

Sinners (2025)
Written and directed by Ryan Coogler
Produced by Ryan Coogler, Zinzi Coogler, Sev Ohanian
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Miles Caton, Jack O’Connell, Hailee Steinfeld, Jayme Lawson, Delroy Lindo, Yao, Li Jun Li, Wunmi Mosaku
Warner Bros., Rated R, Running time 137 minutes, Opens April 18, 2025.

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