Ryan Coogler made a vampire movie set in Jim Crow Mississippi and somehow turned it into one of the best films of 2025. That sentence should not work. It does.

Sinners follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans who return to Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1932 after seven years running with the Chicago Outfit. They've stolen enough money to buy a sawmill and convert it into a juke joint for the local Black community. Their plan is simple: build something of their own, in a place that says they can't own anything.

The first half of the film is patient, character-driven, and genuinely absorbing. Coogler takes his time establishing the community: Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), Smoke's estranged wife and Hoodoo practitioner. Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), an aging harmonica legend. Grace and Bo Chow (Li Jun Li and Yao), a Chinese couple who supply the joint from their general store. Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller), a sharecropper turned bouncer. And Sammie (Miles Caton, in a star-making debut), the twins' young cousin, a preacher's kid with a guitar and a voice that sounds like it came from somewhere beyond the physical world.

The musical sequences are transcendent. Not figuratively. Literally. When Sammie plays on the joint's opening night, the film enters a visionary space where the spirits of past and future musicians appear in the crowd. Blues, gospel, jazz, rock, hip-hop. The entire history of Black American music summoned by one performance. Ludwig Goransson's score does extraordinary work here. It's the scene that earned Sinners its sixteen Academy Award nominations, and deservedly so.

But the music also summons something else. Remmick (Jack O'Connell), an Irish immigrant vampire who has been sheltering with local Klansmen, arrives at the juke joint with his growing coven. He offers money and music in exchange for entry. Smoke refuses. And from that refusal, the film pivots into full-blown survival horror.

The second half is brutal, claustrophobic, and thrilling. Remmick picks off the community one by one. Stack is turned. Cornbread is turned. Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack's white-passing ex-girlfriend, is turned. The survivors barricade inside the joint and fight with garlic, faith, and whatever weapons they can find. The body count is real. Annie, Delta Slim, Grace, and Bo all die fighting.

Here's what elevates Sinners above standard horror fare, and above Coogler's weaker work: the vampire mythology is a metaphor, but it doesn't replace the story. The vampires represent exploitation, consumption, and the seductive promise that giving up your identity will set you free. Remmick literally tells the survivors that vampirism offers immortality and freedom from persecution. The film understands that this is exactly what systemic oppression sounds like when it's trying to be persuasive. But the metaphor works because the horror works first. You don't need to decode the allegory to be terrified.

The film has problems. It's 138 minutes, and some of the setup could be tighter. The Hailee Steinfeld character, who passes as white and becomes one of the first turned, feels underwritten relative to her narrative importance. And the racial themes, while historically grounded, are presented without much complexity on the white side. The Klansmen are uniformly terrible, which is historically accurate but dramatically flat. Remmick, the Irish vampire, is more interesting because he exists outside the binary, but even his characterization doesn't quite earn the depth Coogler seems to want.

But what Sinners gets right, it gets profoundly right. The brotherhood between Smoke and Stack is the emotional spine, and Jordan's dual performance is extraordinary. Smoke's sacrifice in the final act, killing the Klan members who plan to attack at dawn before dying himself, is heroic in the oldest sense. He's not fighting for ideology. He's fighting so his cousin can live. The epilogue, set in 1992, where an elderly Sammie meets an ageless Stack and Mary and turns down immortality because he'd rather die human, is the film's quiet masterpiece. It says: freedom isn't living forever. Freedom is choosing what your life means.

For a film with sixteen Oscar nominations and nearly $370 million worldwide, Sinners is remarkably uncommercial in its soul. It's a genuine piece of filmmaking, not a franchise product.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Systemic Racial Oppression as Narrative Foundation	4	High	High	5.04
White Villainy Without Complexity	3	Moderate	Moderate	3
Institutional Exploitation (Company Scrip)	2	High	Moderate	1.4
Racial Passing as Survival Strategy	2	High	Low	0.7
Multicultural Coalition Against White Supremacy	2	High	Low	0.7
TOTAL WOKE				10.8

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Brotherhood and Fraternal Sacrifice	5	High	High	6.3
Community Built Through Shared Labor	4	High	High	5.04
Consequences of Sin / Moral Weight of Choices	3	High	High	3.78
Rejection of Immortality / Choosing Mortality with Meaning	4	High	Moderate	2.8
Faith as Real Spiritual Force	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Music as Sacred Cultural Heritage	3	High	Moderate	2.1
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				22.1

Score Margin: +4 TRAD