Sinners in the Sugar Shack

A Review of Ryan Coogler’s Latest Film

Apr 28, 2025

Inside the Sugar Shack, the monsters aren't who you expect.

Hello Hunters, and welcome back to Watchdog, my new segment tracking the stories lighting up our screens. I appreciate you being here while Killer Instinct grows!

Today, we’re exploring Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s latest film. This supernatural horror story is already making a powerful impression. In Sinners, Coogler and longtime collaborator Michael B. Jordan dive into the heart of American memory, betrayal, faith, and survival, all inside a vivid, living canvas.

Released in spring 2025, Sinners brings together an all-star team: directed by Ryan Coogler, starring Michael B. Jordan, and distributed through Warner Bros. Already outperforming box office projections for original horror films, Sinners shows Coogler’s built-in trust and the power of strong word-of-mouth momentum.

Critically praised for its daring visuals, haunting score, and bold reimagining of genre conventions, Sinners is still playing in theaters as of this writing. It’s a film meant for the big screen: immersive, painterly, and vibrating with sound and shadow.

Set in 1932 in the Jim Crow Mississippi Delta, Sinners stars Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Smoke and Stack. They have returned home after working for Al Capone in Chicago to start a juke joint for the Black community. The twins purchase an old saw mill from a white landowner whose hidden motives shape the story's horror. The film's plot takes place over 24 hours and peaks when vampires invade the twins' grand opening.

Performance & Cast

Michael B. Jordan carries an extraordinary burden here, portraying twin brothers with sharply different energies. He plays twins while maintaining the film's tone, which is challenging, as it could easily have become tacky or ineffective. His performance is layered: weary in one brother, almost electric in the other, a reminder of his range beyond the blockbuster hero roles he's often associated with.

The supporting cast shines, layering the world Coogler built with soulful, lived-in performances. Wunmi Mosaku is brilliant as Annie, who provides the knowledge that enables some to survive. Jayme Lawson brings depth to Pearline, the married woman entangled with Sammie. Playing Sammie, named after Coogler’s uncle’s wife, Miles Canton gives an understated but emotional performance. Saul Williams, musician and poet, plays Sammie’s father, the preacher Jedidiah Moore, a layered casting choice, given Williams' upbringing as a preacher’s son.

Perhaps the most controversial casting of this film is Hailee Steinfeld as Mary, a white woman with distant Black ancestry, which reflects Steinfeld’s real racial identity. Her father is Jewish, and her mother is primarily of European descent, as well as Filipino and Black. King of Reads delivers an apt critique of the casting and associated colorism. Mary’s acceptance into Black spaces, and Hailee Steinfeld’s in turn through this role, is fraught with controversy about access and identity.

One critique I have not heard enough among commentators is that Hailee Steinfeld is also a Zionist who has taken and posted pictures with IOF soldiers. Her public support of Israel has been consistent and unsettling. More consideration and research regarding Mary’s casting, character, and impact may have been beneficial.

The Delta’s Diversity and Depth

One of the film’s quieter strengths is its portrayal of a broader, richer image of the South than audiences are often given. We see Indigenous Choctaw characters, Chinese characters, and a multiracial community that reflects the region's true, complex history.

Coogler’s research is precise: His father-in-law descends from the Chinese community in the Mississippi Delta, and to ensure authenticity, Coogler consulted filmmaker Dolly Li, who produced the documentary The Untold Story of America’s Southern Chinese. It’s a refreshing refusal to reduce Southern history to a simple black/white binary, deepening the stakes of the horror unfolding onscreen.

While Sinners beautifully broadens its depiction of Southern life beyond a racial binary, some viewers have noted the absence of visibly Black queer life in the community, a critical part of the real historical juke joints and blues tradition. I highly recommend Brooke Obie’s Black Girl Watching's outstanding longform review for a deeper reflection on this and more.

The Deal Behind the Movie

A critical part of Sinners' significance starts behind the scenes.

Ryan Coogler negotiated a groundbreaking deal with Warner Bros.: After 25 years, full ownership of the film reverts to him. He also secured a first-dollar agreement, meaning he profits from the first ticket sold, not just after the film becomes profitable. Though Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese have secured similar deals in the past, this is a quiet revolution in an industry where studios notoriously hold rights into perpetuity, particularly for a Black filmmaker operating at the highest commercial level.

The ability to own one's creative legacy is rare, and it's a testament to Coogler’s career's consistent excellence, from the intimate storytelling of Fruitvale Station, the Creed franchise, Coogler as co-producer for Judas and the Black Messiah, and the global phenomenon of Black Panther. Coogler and Jordan’s creative partnership has matured into something that can break records and set new precedents.

But Sinners stands apart: it’s his first original film, written and directed by Coogler.

The project was informed by Coogler’s relationship with his Uncle James from Mississippi, who migrated to California and introduced Coogler to the Delta Blues. Coogler describes the blues as one of the most significant artistic contributions to the world, born of Black survival through slavery and Jim Crow apartheid. The inspiration for the film came from Koko Taylor’s song "Wang Dang Doodle," about a small community gathering to throw a wild party. Uncle James passed away in 2015 while Coogler was working on Creed. This background explains why this film is so personal to Coogler and what he has sacrificed to build his reputation, enabling him to negotiate such a deal.

Special thanks to Tait’s Take, whose research into the film’s history and development provided valuable context for this review.

Genre and Innovation

At its core, Sinners is supernatural racial horror. The genre innovation lies in how Coogler fuses fantasy, horror, and historical memory into something breathing, raw, and new. It roots classic vampire mythology in the US South's specific traumas, hopes, and faith traditions. Rather than simply recreating the well-trodden paths of horror, Sinners dares to ask: What does sin look like for a people already surviving unimaginable cruelty?

Syncretism in the Black US South

Religion is everywhere in Sinners, not just in the churches and gospel hymns, but in the underlying structure of the horror itself. The film opens squarely within the tradition of Southern Black Christianity, with all its familiar rituals of prayer, gathering, and hope. But interestingly, it’s not the Christian framework that ultimately arms the characters against darkness.

Through the character of Annie, one of the twins’ lovers, Sinners introduces African-rooted spiritual practices: the herbs, the signs, and the ancestral protections often dismissed as “superstition.” Tait notes that the film’s creators consulted Dr. Yvonne Chireau, author of Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, to represent these practices accurately, and it shows. Those deeper, older traditions ultimately allow the community to resist the vampires and fight back.

Rather than reducing Black Southern faith to Christianity alone, Sinners reminds us that, much like Black Caribbean traditions, the South has always harbored a rich undercurrent of syncretism. The blending of Christian belief with older African, Indigenous, and diasporic spiritual technologies is a survival instinct in itself.

Cinematography & Aesthetics: A Living Painting

Sinners feels like stepping inside an Ernie Barnes painting.

Barnes, a celebrated American painter and former NFL player, captured Black life's rhythm, resilience, and communal spirit in the 20th century. His most famous work, The Sugar Shack, became iconic for its kinetic depictions of bodies in motion: dancing, laughing, praying, and surviving. Barnes’s style—elongated figures, rich earth tones, and a sense of constant movement—is everywhere in Sinners. The lighting feels brushed on rather than staged. The blocking of actors feels choreographed, almost balletic. It's an audacious aesthetic choice that pays off: the world of Sinners feels heightened, mythic, deeply human.

Sinners’ cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw made history as the first woman to shoot a feature film on a 65mm. For those interested in diving into the more technical aspects of achieving this film, check out Arkapaw's interview with Collider.

The Soundtrack’s Story

The soundtrack of Sinners is another brushstroke on the canvas. Ludwig Göransson is the composer and an executive producer for Sinners. Göransson has served as the composer for all of Coogler’s films, a consistent characteristic of Coogler’s approach to filmmaking. He works with the same teams on many of his projects. Blues and roots music flood the film as emotional narration. Göransson extensively researched the film’s soundtrack, which walks us through sorrow, temptation, betrayal, and hope, sometimes more powerfully than dialogue. The soundtrack features artists like Rod Wave, Raphael Saadiq, and James Blake. If the visuals paint the South, the music gives it breath.

Diaspora Through Surreal Montage

There’s a pivotal sequence where the community gathers in a juke joint, and the film slips into a surreal montage. Time, geography, and race blur as the dancers move, pulling figures into the space representing different branches of the Diaspora’s influence, including a Chinese figure, symbolizing how deeply and unexpectedly Black cultural currents have flowed. The surreal montage plays like an ode to the Black Diaspora — not just a historical fact, but a living, evolving force. It honors the reach and resilience of Black culture: how it shapes and is shaped by contact, movement, survival, and celebration across continents.

Vampires Not Villains

At its heart, Sinners is a horror film about despair — and the dangerous seductions despair invites. A pivotal moment comes when the vampires speak directly to the humans, describing their world as too twisted and broken to be saved.

And disturbingly, they're not wrong.

At its core, Sinners affirms Black creation, survival, and defiance as sacred, and names the real sin as the enduring violence of white supremacy. Sinners suggests the vampires are not the true villains at all. The true horror lies in human betrayal: white men deceive the Black protagonists into buying a slaughterhouse, a site of planned racial destruction. The vampires, rather than exploiting this, reveal the betrayal to the humans, and ultimately, they keep their promises, transcending the very racial lines the humans themselves could not overcome.

It's a chilling reversal: the so-called monsters show more loyalty, truthfulness, and clarity than the world they supposedly intended to prey upon. In the end, Sinners offers a meditation not just on fear of the supernatural, but on the collapse of human moral systems.

Final Verdict

Sinners lives up to the hype.

Coogler’s direction, Jordan’s layered performances, the lush painterly visuals, and the soul-soaked music come together to create something unforgettable.

If you can, catch it in theaters. It deserves to be seen on a big screen—large enough to step inside the Sugar Shack and dance with your ghosts. Sinners, in all its haunted beauty, is a story worth seeing, remembering, and holding close.

Inside the Sugar Shack, the spirits dance, the vampires testify, and the living remember: survival is a kind of freedom.