Sinners (Ryan Coogler, 2025)

The Devil Blues

The first forty minutes of Ryan Coogler's Sinners may be one of the best films of 2025. The rest? Not so much. 

It's like when Kurosawa's Seven Samurai is mentioned-- everyone talks of the final battle in a rainstorm, but no one really talks about the superb first hour when all the characters are introduced, the stakes quickly and vividly established; that final battle wouldn't have half the impact if we didn't follow the first hour's journey, getting to know who's involved, how they got recruited, and why. 

It's that quality Kurosawa captures nicely that Coogler ably recaptures, of people quietly eking out a living at the margins of society, not prospering exactly but not suffering too much, just content to be. Then a wind comes-- in Kurosawa's case, a horde of bandits,  in Coogler's case a pair of twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both played by Coogler's favorite actor Michael B Jordan-- and suddenly people are fearing and wanting again, the Japanese peasants fearing to lose what little they have, the Southerners wanting a little bit more cash than what they're used to earning. And they band together, the peasants and samurai in their tiny village, the Southern folk in their big barn, and a small miracle of collaboration is born.

There's the music of course. Soundtrack with Coogler's other longtime collaborator, Ludwig Goransson, and the equally powerful new creative partner Miles Caton-- like many singer-musicians, an intriguing enough actor (what's singing after all but performance through song?); accompanied with a guitar he's amazing. 

Coogler couldn't pick a more offhand occasion for us to first hear Caton-- on Stack's jalopy, rolling down a dirt road with Stack urging his cousin Sammie (Caton) to sing something; Caton strums a few bars and Stack stares. "Travelin' / I don't know why in the world I'm here / 'Cause the woman that I'm lovin / She sure don't feel my care" The lyrics seem commonplace but Caton's plaintive voice, carried by the sharp twang of the guitar strings, give the words tang and bite and power. "We gon make some money! We gon make some money!" Stack declares, and he's not wrong. 

Folks like to point to Caton singing "I Lied to You" as the film's high point, Coogler's camera gliding through past and present and future, all spatial boundaries literally burning to the ground and yes it's a fine song and Caton absolutely delivers but it's saddled to my mind with an unnecessarily explicit thesis driven by unnecessarily elaborate effects; less fussy and far better is yet another car scene that happens earlier, with Delroy Lindo as pianist Delta Slim joining Sammie and Stack in their jalopy, waving as he recognizes some faces on a chain gang they drive past. He tells the story of the band they once formed with the encouragement of a prison warden, of the prodigious amount of money they earned one night in a concert, and of the sobering fate of one fellow musician and his money soon after. And then Slim starts humming, then singing. No effects, no thesis,  just a hard life lived (reflected on his careworn face), and feelings so big and deep and strong he has to express them in song or bust a gut trying to hold them in. 

And then yes vampires. And (maybe for me only) the movie falls flat on its face, becomes yet another supernatural horror flick stuffed with standard-issue digital effects when it was so much more before. There was the ghost of an interesting idea here, of Gaelic music set in opposition to the blues, but we don't really get to see the (WARNING: details of the plot to be explicitly discussed hereafter!) recently turned being wooed and seduced to the rhythms of "Rocky Road to Dublin." Instead of a fangs-versus-shotguns siege, couldn't the living and the dead hold a danceoff instead, breakdancers versus riverdancers in a whirl of choreographed mayhem?

I'll give Coogler this much, the bloodsucker interlude did provide an excuse for the lovely epilogue set decades later, where Stack and his girl Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) visit a much older Sammie (now played by the legendary Buddy Guy) and prompts the old man to reprise his "Travelin," now with additional mileage and pain. And if that wasn't enough, Coogler treats us to yet another surpassingly lovely post-credit sequence, of the younger Sammie reprising "This Little Light of Mine"-- sung earlier as traditional gospel with a church choir, now tweaked as a lonely gloriously blues anthem. In my perfect world, Coogler's Sinners is only sixty-five minutes long and all music, no fangs, with Coogler putting full faith in the seductive diabolic power of music as opposed to ho-hum digital effects. But I guess I gotta settle for what I've got.