Sinners

“What y’all know about culture?” That was the first question that popped into my mind after watching the best film I’ve seen in theater this year. Since that initial viewing, I’ve witnessed social media explode with discussion about the creators of this film, its thematics, and how incredibly high quality it is for an original blockbuster film in 2025. Now I ask everyone who has engaged with this piece of cinema by viewing, creating, or discussing it the same question that popped into my mind after my first viewing. What y’all know about culture?

Sinners, written and directed by Ryan Coogler, has been the newest film to take the world by storm. It’s a horror film centered around two twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, played by Michael B. Jordan and their cousin Sammie, a young man in love with playing guitar and singing the blues, played by Miles Caton. As we watch this charismatic crew prepare to open a juke joint by sundown, mischief, chaos, and evil begins to approach their party. It’s 1930s Mississippi and the supernatural is far more real than you’d believed. Music brings power and folk tale stories are true history, but can these things come back to bite away our freedom?

While this film feels as fun as a horror comedy comic book, there’s a serious backdrop of cultural/generational trauma, the painful yearning for true freedom, and the expression of these emotions through music, celebration, and love. It’s all shot beautifully on 65mm film with 70mm cameras creating a great sense of nostalgia for a memory of something you’ve never experienced before. Sinners may be promoted as a horror film, but I’d say it's actually a rollercoaster genre and emotion that can’t be categorized so easily. I’d even go as far as to say that breaking genre and tradition is part of the point of the film. 

Genres have become something we use to categorize art in order to market it to demographics that would find interest in that type of art or others like it. A consequence of this use of categorization has been the creation of barriers between art and cultures that should be put into question, and I believe Sinners is Ryan Coogler’s response. The answer to “What is genre?” is far more complex than what you’d find by a simple definition search. 

Throughout the film we get the pleasure to hear the beautiful Blues music performed by characters like Sammie, Delta Slim, an older pianist we meet in the first act, and Pearline, a singer whose voice is as lovely as she is enamoring. It’s music primarily created by African Americans in the south of the United States and has been used as a way to express their emotion since the origin of their time here. Usually, people can mistake Blues music to be solely made to express their feelings of pain and sorrow, but Sinners doesn't make that mistake. The Blues is the backbone to the film. Moments of joy and celebration will have Blues music that reflects the emotions while times where the darkness of our characters’ experiences will be backdropped by that very genre as well. It’s neat and a fun usage of Blues music, but what comes next is where I think Sinners actually becomes a film that’s interesting and worth discussing. 

What happens when there’s a group of people that come with a genre of music that is nearly identical to Blues but isn’t exactly the same? Should they be welcome with open arms or do we turn them down? What if they force themselves to be acknowledged? What if the music we make isn’t the only thing we have in common with them? Sinners asks these questions and hopes that you will engage with it in a way to provide your own answers as it shows its own answer. 

Sinners fully drop the veil of mystery in its horror when the first supernatural villain arrives. Remmick, an Irish vampire, has come to force Sammie into becoming a vampire. As stated previously, in this world music brings power and Sammie has that power. To clarify, music can connect the creator and its enjoyers with the generations who created/enjoyed it in the past and those who will create/enjoy it in the future. Even though Remmick has his own music he’s unable to connect with his generations, and he believes that Sammie can be the solution. 

If Blues is the genre of our protagonists, then Irish Folk is the genre of our antagonists. It’s music primarily created by the Irish and has been used as a way to express their emotion. Usually, people can mistake Irish Folk music to be solely made to express their feelings of pain and sorrow, but it’s a genre that can be used for any type of emotional expression. If that description sounds awfully familiar to you that’s because it is. Irish Folk and Blues are genres created by different cultures that experienced similar histories, and while there is a list of musical differences between the two it’s difficult to admit that they’re more alike than they’re not. In this case, the only difference is that Remmick’s music won’t let him connect with his people in the same way that Sammie’s can. 

I believe it’s the corruption of the arts’ creation that is preventing Remmick from being able to use music in the same way that Sammie uses his. In the film we see how different types of corruption can be used to hurt people and culture. Smoke and Stack are constantly creating chaos because of their anger and greed respectively. We can infer that Slim has a bit of musical power as well, but not as strong as Sammie’s because he corrupts it with his dying need for alcohol and his nihilism. Pearline may be a singer, but her lust may be what stops her from having that power. Lisa has good intentions, but puts everyone in danger out of selfishness and pride. Finally, Remmick has a true supernatural power to steal the identities, memories, art, and cultures of others, but stealing those things isn’t the same as originally creating your own. 

Sinners uses musical genres to enforce barriers between cultures and makes its villain a character that wants to break that barrier for his own corrupted, and somewhat sympathetic, desires. It then blatantly gives that villain a cultural history that mirrors our protagonists’ in order to show that he isn’t exactly corrupted because of the cultural history, rather he’s corrupted because he’s approaching his desires in a way that isn’t healthy for himself and those around him. That same corruption applies to almost all of our characters with exception to Sammie, Annie(Smoke’s estranged wife), Mary(Stack’s ex-girlfriend), and Bo(Lisa’s husband). These are the only characters that act out of love for other characters, the community, and the culture. 

This idea of genre as a barrier and corruption in art creation is actually where I think we can find the answer to the original question, “What y’all know about culture?” Culture is the collective arts, traits, habits, and ideas created and accumulated by a group of people with the aspects being a mix of both good and evil, but I think it’s much more than just that. To me, culture is everything that’s been made or done out of every emotion by people who are like me throughout the future and past. Whether it be generations worth of trauma or traditions to remember those who passed in order to keep the memory of their soul alive, culture is what holds people together. To corrupt culture is to poison a fountain that’s supposed to bring life to everyone who sips out of it. We should all be able to experience, acknowledge, and interact with our cultures without hurting others or their cultures. My interpretation of Sinners leads me to believe that Coogler agrees with this thought process and uses the film to explore culture and implore others to do the same

What I love about Sinners is that it feels like it was created by people who love and embrace the beautiful and horrific aspects of the culture they’re part of. I love that there’s an understanding that freedom comes with an acceptance of who you are, where you’re from, and the cultures that you’ve become joint with. If there’s one thing I could ask for from filmmakers that want to create original features it’s the wish for them to be fully connected with every part of themselves and their environment when creating their art. 

It’s not often that a film comes around and is able to make me laugh out loud, wipe away tears that are forming, makes me question the way I think about myself and those like me, and makes my heart skip a beat out of fear. Sinners is an original film for Ryan Coogler, and I think it is one of the most uniquely original films I’ve seen in quite a while. I’ve only sat in theaters to watch this film twice, but I was fully engaged both times as the roughly 140 minutes flew by each time. If you weren’t already a fan of Coogler or anybody else who worked on this film you will absolutely become one.

All that being said, Sinners is by far the best film I’ve seen in theaters so far in 2025. I tried to give a spoiler free discussion on what the film made me think as I sat with it, and hopefully you were able to feel my great praise for this film through the effort it took for me to write this. In any case, I have to at least acknowledge the things I enjoyed about this film without taking too much more of your time. 

Every performance in Sinners is stellar and is partially why these characters are compelling in the first place. The writing leaves a lot to be interpreted and gives people an opportunity to discuss topics they may have never done previously. I haven’t seen this much discussion about cinema since Barbie’s and Oppenheimer’s releases back in 2023. Some of the cinematography of the film has stayed in my mind all month and the amazing soundtrack as a backdrop to it brings this film life. The pace is snappy, the jokes are funny, and the moments of deep emotion are all done with a level of detail and seriousness that make you want to root for this crew and their messy lives. I applaud everyone who worked on Sinners and wish to see more work from them soon.