“You keep dancing with the devil, one day, he’s going to follow you home.” 

Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners,” a Southern gothic horror released on April 3, 2025, has a whopping 16 Oscar nominations, most notably for Best Picture and Best Actor (Michael B. Jordan), surpassing the previous record of 14 set by ‘All About Eve’ (1950), ‘Titanic’ (1997) and ‘La La Land’ (2016). 

This is Coogler’s fifth feature film that he has directed and written. Four out of the five films star Michael B. Jordan, who also stars as twins Smoke and Stack in “Sinners.”

The film follows the journey of the Smokestack Twins, two brothers who turn a windmill into a juke joint. When music within the joint attracts three vampires, this sets the stage for a violent siege as the brothers are forced to defend their new establishment.

The movie takes place in the 1930s, during the  Jim Crow era in Clarksdale, Mississippi. A key aspect in the film is racial segregation in the town, and how each character’s experience with racism and their upbringing dictate their actions later, with the ensuing violence. 

The twins recruit their little cousin Sammie (Miles Caton) as the joint’s lead performer, who has been looking for a big break to share his song and play his guitar. 

One of the most impressive moments of the movie is a continuous tracking shot in the middle of the juke joint party. Sammie’s powerful music pierces the veil of time, conjuring spirits from the past and future who join the party. This sequence serves as a multigenerational celebration of Black musical heritage. 

But as the sun sets behind the fields, we are introduced to the main villain of the film, an Irish vampire known as Remmick (Jack O’Connell).

Remmick represents the everlong colonial culture, as he and his two musical companions take over the juke joint, on the one night that the twins believed they could escape the oppression of the South. The film uses Remmick’s character to explore complex themes of reclaiming cultural identity in a system that perpetually seeks to strip it away. 

Once the vampires reach the perimeter of the joint, they are unable to enter it. The protagonists attempt to shoot the undead with no success, but Smoke’s wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) reveals that they can use garlic to scare the vampires off and wooden stakes to pierce their hearts.

Throughout the film, characters are forced to grapple with the morality of what to do when your loved ones become possessed.

The cast’s performances make “Sinners” feel deeply personal. Jordan captures both Smoke and Stack’s street smarts and their complex emotional trauma resulting from their profession as former mob enforcers in Chicago. Playing twins is a difficult feat for any actor, requiring a balance of shared brotherly chemistry and distinct, individual traits. Jordan executes this extremely well, developing each twin as a separate, yet convincingly similar pair.

Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw frames the cotton fields in sweeping wide shots that make the twins’ freedom feel vast and fleeting, while composer Ludwig Göransson’s songs integrate seamlessly into the film’s cultural fabric.

The overall pacing and composition of “Sinners” is balanced and flows well with the story’s development, compressing an epic narrative into a single 24-hour period.

“Sinners”

2 hours, 18 minutes

Rated R

Directed by Ryan Coogler

Starring Michael B. Jordan, Jack O’Connell, and Miles Caton