REVIEW: ‘Sinners’ (2025) Is Magnificently Horrifying

Written and directed by Ryan Coogler and produced by his studio Proximity Media, Sinners (2025) takes place in the Jim Crow-era in 1932. With hellish horrors, Coogler weaves a magnificently intricate horror story of magical realism, reflections on Black history and culture, and perseverance against white supremacist oppression.

The film follows twins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan) coming home to Clarksdale, Mississippi, from Chicago, where they’ve made it big. Aiming to start a nightclub where their community, including Stack’s old flame Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) can kick it back after a long day of sharecropping, they bring together old friends Cornbread (Omar Miller), Yao (Bo Chow), his wife Grace (Li Jun Li), Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), their guitar-player cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), and Smoke’s former lover Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) to make the nightclub a roiling success.

Community and the twins’ relationship to it is the throughline of Sinners. While they may have had other reasons, love for their community drove Smoke and Stack back to the South despite their success in Chicago. It’s evident in the first act, as Coogler takes abundant time and effort to introduce audiences to the various players of the story as Smoke and Stack recruit their team and confront their past.

Sinners (2025) excels on every technical level.

Coogler’s dialogue is sharp, witty, and continuously laced with emotional depth for all his characters. While the time taken to build this setting might feel slow, it’s worth it for the crescendo of Sinners‘ action that raptures the audience and ensemble cast into a horrific spectacle.

The Clarksdale in Sinners is vibrant and full of economic ingenuity, friendships, music, dance, and more. It  connects us to each character and the community writ-large. Coogler’s love for his community continues to shine in his filmography, and it underscores the tragedy even further when it strikes. Working with cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw, Coogler makes every shot count.

Their attention to color is particularly striking in the city setting and throughout the film, especially in taking care for lighting Black skin tones in all their variety, as Coogler typically does in his filmography. Every shot is indispensable to the story, demanding your attention throughout.

A horrifying spectacle, everything in Sinners (2025) is breathtaking.

Sinners soundtrack, composed by Coogler collaborator Ludwig Göransson, is excellent, taking the audience through various intimate and communal settings. But even more than the soundtrack is the very role of sound itself. The sound department has made music and sound characters of their own, immersing audiences even more into the narrative with precise beats, booms, echoes, and sharpness. It’s a superb effect that proves Coogler and his entire team as remarkable filmmakers.

The cast of Sinners is also indispensable to its narrative success. Jordan gives a riveting dual performance as Smoke and Stack, switching seamlessly between the roles and acting against himself to humorous and emotional effect. As the action gets going, Jordan proves himself once again as an action hero, slaying monsters with gusto to marvelous effect. As a dual protagonist, he rightly stands out in the ensemble cast.

Mosaku is mesmeric and commanding as Annie, a spiritual woman who is Coogler’s Cassandra, warning the brothers not to “bite off more than [they] can chew.” Mosaku and Coogler make Annie multi-layered, a grieving mother who still relishes in joy with her community. As the chaos befalls her and her loved ones, Annie is a steadfast and complex heroine, making her one of the standouts of the film.

The ensemble cast shines in Ryan Coogler’s latest genre success.

Canton is initially reserved as Sammie, following his older cousins along for the ride that his preacher father, Jedidiah (Saul Williams), warns him against. But as the narrative grows, so does Sammie’s character As the audience is treated to Sammie’s magnificent guitar playing during the nightclub scenes, particularly during a several-minute-long guitar solo that may very well be the greatest scene Coogler has directed in his career.

I shan’t spoil what it is, but I can say that it weaves Black history together in such a way that may have never been done before in a major cinema release. And Canton is the perfect harbinger for such a magnificent scene.

The rest of the cast is also superb. Steinfeld is captivating as the vivacious Mary, stoking an old flame with the resistant Stack. While Mary is white, she is also connected to Clarksdale’s Black community. having Black ancestry via her mother, just like Steinfeld in real life. It’s a delicate balance that works well in Coogler’s hands and that Steinfeld plays with sensitivity and grace.

Lindo is constantly hilarious as Delta Slim, providing the necessary comedy relief for horror, but also with his own depth of character. The same is true of Cornbread, who is out to make a better living for his family, but can also be a source of comic relief without expense for his character. With virtually all of his cast, Coogler strikes the right balance of seriousness, humor, joy, sadness, terror, and overall multi-layered humanity.

Coogler’s best film to date uses genre to run the emotional gambit.

Coogler is a masterful horror director from jump. From the first scene, we immediately get appropriate and well-positioned jump scares. The terror builds gradually as you anticipate the monsters coming for Smoke, Stack, and their nightclub patrons and team.

While film and TV have done the vampire concept ad nauseam, Coogler is able to make it his own social commentary, with his dialogue incorporating themes of white supremacist domination, appropriation of Black music and culture, capitalism, and much more. While we’re familiar with the monster, Sinners presents them in a new light.

Sinners is Ryan Coogler’s magnum opus to date. With extraordinary direction, writing, social commentary, sound design, cinematography, scares, and music that will command your attention, Coogler once again showcases he is a master filmmaker with original and bold vision. With a superb cast and crew to make his vision even more entrancing, it’s a must-see theatrical experience. Hollywood desperately needs original and bold ideas, and Sinners fits that bill and so much more.

Sinners (2025) premieres in theaters nationwide on April 18th.