The devil went down to Mississippi
The devil comes in many forms, but sometimes he just carries a guitar. At least, that’s how the story of Robert Johnson goes. A talented young singer desperate to escape the backbreaking drudgery of Delta poverty supposedly carried his six-string to a crossroads one night early in the Great Depression. There he met a shadowy figure who tuned the guitar, played a few haunting bars, and handed it back — the instrument now capable of conjuring songs that could stir the heavens, beckon the body to move, and shatter the human soul. Johnson’s fingers and voice gained supernatural power overnight, birthing blues standards and norms that continue to echo through American music a century later. In return, according to the legend, he lost something far more eternal than calluses on his hands.
At first glance, it’s a simple fable: a poor Black man, through grit and a bit of magic, gains transporting musical prowess. But there’s a lot of cultural baggage to the myth of Robert Johnson’s deal with the devil. This story celebrates the mystical connection between outsider art and spirit — the idea that creativity isn’t just born from hard work and plucky talent, but from deep, elemental forces. Through another lens, the story reflects the dark gaze of a country that saw Black culture as something sensual and unruly, and therefore both dangerous and alluring — a gift so powerful it must have been stolen from somewhere (or someone) sinister. The blues and its mythical origins offer a warped mirror image of the very racial violence and suppression that kept it underground and made it necessary.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is not a straightforward retelling of Robert Johnson’s story, but it has the same setting and spirit. Sinners is not strictly an analogy about racial violence, or what’s lost in cultural assimilation and appropriation, or the enrapturing escapism of music, or rebellion against the stagnant modes of power. Sinners, instead, recognizes that all of those ideas are knotted together in Black identity: art and blood, sin and survival, history and horror. Sinners is a truly messy film, but it is deeply passionate and immensely satisfying. Coogler can’t always thread it all together, but he plays the whole damned symphony, anyway.
Before I proceed: a spoiler warning. All of Sinners’ marketing and press coverage — trailers, interviews, and review headlines — reveals plot points and twists that the movie patiently develops and treats as unexpected revelations. So if you’re going in totally fresh and want to preserve the surprises, consider this your exit point.
Sinners is a film that is hard to pin down with rigid genre descriptors. The basic premise — a group of characters setting up a juke joint for the Black community in Mississippi, then fighting off a raid of vampires on its opening night — might suggest a violent horror movie. And it’s not not that. But Coogler tosses in a platter of sliced-up styles and genre ingredients like he’s making a stew: It’s a blood-soaked Western, a sweaty exploitation flick, a period drama, and even hints of a giallo fever dream.
Coogler uses Sinners as both an homage to familiar tropes and an act of sheer invention. For example, he hews tightly to some classic vampire rules: garlic and wooden stakes are key anti-vampire measures like this is a classic Universal monster story. But Coogler also blows it up enough so that it’s never over-familiar, tweaking the lore and tying the creatures directly to the film’s reckoning of the Black American experience. These vampires aren’t just bloodsuckers — they’re metaphors for cultural theft and assimilation, creatures whose monstrousness is entwined with the human systems of oppression that bred them. It’s a smart and expansive reimagining of familiar mythology, where being bitten isn’t just physical death but a seduction into a different kind of power.
The film’s non-supernatural opening act follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans and Chicago gangsters returning to their hometown in the Delta with stolen cash and a dangerous glint in their eyes. They set up a juke joint — an improvised music hall and haven for sweaty Black joy — by buying land from a racist landowner (David Maldonado). Along the way, they recruit their cousin, the blues prodigy Sammie Moore (Miles Caton); pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo); bouncer Cornbread (Omar Miller); and Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao), Chinese shopkeepers who provide supplies and decorate the joint. The crew has the feeling of a patchwork family.
Opening night brings more than just booze and blues, though. A mysterious, glowy-eyed Irishman named Remmick (Jack O’Connell) and his band of pale, grinning minions arrive, offering money and music in exchange for entry. The Moores turn them away, but the danger has arrived. Remmick and his crew are vampires, and they slowly “turn” Smoke and Stack’s crew into a freaky panethnic legion. The juke joint’s sacred space, the fragile temple of gratification, falls under siege.
The one sanctuary the survivors have is the simple magic of walls and invitation: As long as no living soul invites the vampires inside, the joint remains a fortress. Thus begins a tense, night-long chess match: monsters coax survivors outside through lies and temptation. One scene mimics The Thing’s most famous moment — a group of holdouts undergoing a ritual to prove they remain infection-free, one person at a time.
Despite its prodigious liters of fake blood and severed tendons, Sinners doesn’t follow the normal arc of a horror film. It’s too restless for that, too fascinated with using its plot to push its scenario (and associated metaphors) further to its limit. For example, much of this vampire film more resembles a zombie — hordes of shambling creatures just outside a barricaded fort. Some of the hand-to-hand action more resembles martial arts films than thrillers or spooky stories. A memorable epilogue (one of three!) looks quite a bit like a cathartic revenge flick. It’s a chameleon of a film.
Nowhere is the film’s thematic depth more stirring than in its centerpiece scene: a transcendent musical performance about halfway through the film. Sammie, guitar in hand, pours out a blistering blues riff that splits open the air itself. The camera soars through the room, revealing a cracked sky and a burning, roofless church populated by the ghosts of Black musical history past, present, and yet to come — tribal drums, jazz grooves, the birth of rap, soul singers, proto-disco beats, all woven together in a single, shuddering long take. It’s maybe the best scene of the year: a reckoning with music’s power to summon, to protect, to destroy, to connect us all across time and space. It’s an invocation of God and gods, of the holy and the infernal, all united in the rapture of Black music.
Fittingly, Ludwig Göransson’s soundtrack feels like it was born from the same crossroads myth as Robert Johnson’s guitar. The soundtrack is a wonder: a blend of diegetic, raucous blues performances — many recorded live on set — and a mythic, swelling score that nods to everything from field hollers to Irish folk to psychedelic rock. Göransson matches the ambition and sprawl of Coogler’s writing and direction beat for beat. It’s a front-runner for the best movie soundtrack of 2025.
As the film builds, it ties together legends and monsters from various oppressed cultures into one monomyth of sorts — creatures and spells whispered about by Native Americans, Black Americans, Cajun Americans, Irish Americans, Asian Americans. But one of Coogler’s sharpest subversions is who he leaves out of the supernatural equation: The Ku Klux Klan, who are absent most of the runtime but whose abrupt and absolute violence looms over the entire affair, are never the vampires or monsters in the supernatural attacks. They’re just people. Their evil doesn’t need metaphor. In a film crawling with literal demons, it’s the bigotry and cruelty of man that’s the scariest monster of all, the final beast slain.
The film’s mess expands to the narrative. This isn’t a slick plot machine tuned for maximal efficiency. Setup is slow, precise, and outstanding, but the payoff is a too chaotic and undisciplined. The characters are a bit of jumble, and fall in and out of the story in a messy cadence. The two groups of people most likely to be disappointed by Sinners are thriller buffs and horror buffs — this lacks the tight, plotty tension of the best of the former genre, and the coherent sense of gnawing dread expected of the latter. I was a little irked at the inconsistent level of danger of the vampires — sometimes they’re indestructible scions, and a group of people can’t take one down. Other times, they fall like faceless zombies, a single person taking down a horde with one gun.
The cast, thankfully, rises to the ambitious material. Michael B. Jordan anchors the film with a showy, movie-carrying double performance as Smoke and Stack. These two men look the same but embody different ends of the American Black experience. Smoke is a family man aching from the loss of his child, and fiercer as a result; Stack is more carefree but follows his whims and passions. Jordan doesn’t overplay the distinction, making them two parts of a whole, but I wish the film leaned even harder into their psychological differences and mirrored traits. Still, Jordan’s work here is dynamic, carrying all the film’s many aims on his shoulders.
Among the supporting cast, Caton gives a true breakout performance as Sammie; he has that inward presence that suggests complex interiority, and a wonderful voice and musicality to match. Hailee Steinfeld, whose Mary passes as white and has unresolved romantic tension with Stack, brings a lot of sizzle. I’m not surprised she’s received a lot of love from social media. Meanwhile, Lindo and Miller as Delta Slim and Cornbread bring a shaggy warmth and humor that keeps the film’s stakes from ever turning too dour.
It’s always a rare thrill to see a visionary director given a massive budget and a wide berth to make something so personal and unfiltered. Sinners belongs in the same conversation as Babylon, which from me is high praise. Both are messy passion projects where the ambition alone feels exhilarating. But unlike Babylon — or the slightly less effective Mickey 17 or Nope — Coogler’s vision has connected with audiences. Sinners isn’t just a triumph of art over commerce. It’s a rare case of both at once, and much of that comes down to the fact that it’s just as damn fun as it is rich with ideas. This is a funny, tense, exuberant showstopper and crowd-pleaser — not as slick or mechanical as Top Gun: Maverick, but just as satisfying.
Ryan Coogler emerges from Sinners not just intact from boondoggle accusations, but with his reputation rightfully raised a notch. His direction and vision are electric, his writing bursting with ideas too big and unruly to fit neatly inside a single film. He’s clearly still chasing the same creative instincts that made Fruitvale Station so heartbreaking and Black Panther so resonant — but here, he’s wilder, freer, and willing to leave jagged edges unpolished. In an era when so much of high-budget filmmaking feels smoothed into bland nothingness, Sinners is gloriously, unapologetically alive. Hooray for the big-budget auteur gamble.
It’s still early, but Sinners is the most exciting and satisfying film of 2025 so far. Even with its unevenly cooked plot and tangled themes, plus a handful of minor frustrations and misfires (if you’re going to riff on The Thing, you need a proper payoff), it hits with a force that few movies even attempt anymore. Don’t be too surprised if you start hearing rumors of Ryan Coogler making an exchange with the devil at a crossroads in the Mississippi Delta.
Is It Good?
Very Good (6/8)
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.