Sinners

Written and directed by Ryan Coogler, Sinners sculpts the early history of blues music in the Mississippi Delta—the music’s folklore, legacy, and the African American communities that birthed it—into a mythic horror film, both poignant and terrifying. It adapts the blood-and-fangs conventions of the vampire genre to reflect on how Black art is often stripped of its roots and identity in mainstream culture. Released in 2025, the movie follows twins whose juke joint comes under siege from vampires drawn by the otherworldly talent of a young blues prodigy. Sinners met widespread acclaim for its scope and layered storytelling, earning a record 16 Academy Awards nominations. It won four Oscars, including a best actor award for Michael B. Jordan.

(Read more about the Delta blues and its history.)

Plot summary and characters

Editor’s note: This section contains spoilers.

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The events of Sinners unfold over 24 hours. Twins Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans who have come into money through gang-related activities in Chicago, return to their hometown Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932. There they set up a juke joint (an informal venue offering music, dance, and gambling, typically run by African Americans) in an abandoned sawmill purchased from Hogwood (Dave Maldonado), a white man who, unbeknownst to the twins, is a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) leader. The twins invite their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a plantation worker and virtuosic young blues singer, to perform at the juke joint that evening, accompanied by the alcohol-loving seasoned pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo). They task Chinese shop owners Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) and Bo Chow (Yao) with supplying food and building a sign for the joint and entrust cotton sharecropper Cornbread (Omar Miller) with front-door security. Along the way the twins are entangled in past relationships: Stack is accosted by his former flame Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a married white-passing woman with Black ancestry, who resents Stack for leaving her behind, and Smoke visits his wife, Hoodoo practitioner Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), with whom he continues to mourn the baby they lost years ago. Annie agrees to cook for the juke joint’s customers that night. Meanwhile, Sammie urges Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a married singer, to come to the opening.

Elsewhere in the Mississippi Delta, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irishman, knocks on the door of a racist white couple, Joan (Lola Kirke) and Bert (Peter Dreimanis), seeking protection from a band of Choctaw horsemen who are chasing him. Despite the Choctaws’ warnings, the couple refuses to hand Remmick over—only for Remmick to then reveal himself as a vampire and turn them. Those who become vampires share their memories with all other vampires and pursue a shared goal.

Back at the juke joint, customers—mostly plantation workers—arrive after a hard day’s work to sing, dance, and drink. Pearline heeds Sammie’s call and Mary arrives uninvited but is warmly welcomed in by Cornbread. The evening reaches its apogee with Sammie’s performance of the song “I Lied to You,” written as an ode to his preacher father, who disapproves of the blues, often referring to it as the Devil’s music. As Sammie sings and plays the guitar, the film briefly drifts into a phantasmal sequence in which time and space evaporate and apparitions of past and future Black musicians and performers—invisible to the characters in the film—convene in the juke joint, summoned by Sammie’s sublime talent. The surreal time-bending imagery—which includes an electric guitar player, a DJ, and West African griots—evokes the centuries of shared Black history and culture that inspired musical genres such as the blues, rock and roll, and hip hop. Concurrently, the inclusion of Chinese mythological and cultural iconography—in the form of Sun Wukong (also known as the Monkey King), xiqu (Chinese opera) performers, and martial arts—alludes to the influence of immigrant culture on the American ethos.

It is the supernatural magnetism of Sammie’s music, however, that attracts Remmick and his coven of vampires. Unable to enter the premises without an invitation, they entreat the twins to let them in, claiming to be traveling musicians who believe in equality. Unwilling to trust them, the twins refuse. Mary later talks Stack into letting her find out if the trio has money to spend, but this leads to her being turned into a vampire and converting Stack soon after. The party is called off, and customers are asked to leave; they are all later turned into vampires, as are Cornbread and Bo. Only a handful of survivors remain, including Smoke, Sammie, Annie, Delta Slim, Grace, and Pearline. Annie explains that the vampires can be held off with garlic, wood, and holy water. Their plan is to deny the vampires entry until sunrise, which is injurious to vampires. However, when the vampires threaten to turn Grace’s young daughter, she snaps and shouts for them to come in, intending to fight and finish them off.

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In the ensuing fight, all but Smoke and Sammie are either turned or killed. As Smoke fights with and ultimately subdues Stack, Remmick tries to convert Sammie, telling him ominously, “I want your stories, and I want your songs—and you’re gonna have mine.”

Just as it seems Remmick is going to turn Sammie, Smoke stabs Remmick with a wooden stake, and the vampire goes up in flames, along with most of his horde as the sun rises. The threat vanquished, Smoke sends Sammie home. Hogwood and fellow KKK members arrive shortly after, intending to kill everyone at the joint—a plan that Remmick had informed Smoke about. Smoke guns them all down but is fatally shot in the process. Sammie returns to his father, who implores Sammie to forsake the blues, but he does not.

Decades later Sammie, now old and a professional musician (played by Buddy Guy), is visited by Stack and Mary, who have not aged. Stack reveals that Smoke spared him that night but made him promise to let Sammie live out his life. Stack offers to turn Sammie, thereby granting him immortality, but Sammie declines.

Concept and themes

Coogler’s earliest associations with the blues and stories from Mississippi were through his uncle James, to whom he was close. Coogler’s grief following his uncle’s death in 2015 deepened his interest in the musical genre and its roots in Black history. His family has historical ties to the Mississippi region and the Great Migration, which saw millions of African Americans from rural communities migrate from the American South to urban areas in Northern and Western states during the 20th century to seek economic opportunities and avoid racial oppression, most notably inflicted through segregation under Jim Crow laws. However, Coogler was not interested solely in crafting an allegory of racial violence but rather in exploring themes of family and community by way of the life-affirming cultural expression—best exemplified by the blues—of the people from that time and place. He told Variety in 2025,

When people think about the 1930s Mississippi, the first thing that comes to mind is segregation. Hard times. You don’t think about people dealing with all that actually having a good time, like having a party so good you wish you could go to it. I was like, “Oh yeah, we might have a movie here.” And not just a movie, but a movie for our time now.

The blues’ long-standing association with the supernatural afforded Coogler the opportunity to reimagine familiar archetypes linked to the blues such as twins, an unnaturally gifted musician, and crossroads. Influenced by Stephen King’s novel ’Salem’s Lot (1975), Coogler incorporated the vampire mythos to produce a fitting thematic antagonist who threatens the erasure of freedom, cultural history, and communal memory. Sinners reserves perhaps its most scathing commentary for the way Black art is absorbed and commodified by a white-dominant mainstream culture that strips it of context and ownership. These central metaphors are made complex by the nuances in racial dynamics among Black, Irish, and Choctaw communities and resist reductive binary interpretations of oppression. In many respects the film draws parallels between vampirism and organized religion—especially in conjunction with colonialism—in their tendency to impose conformity and flatten meaningful differences.

Development, filming, and music

By Christmas 2023 Coogler had completed the script for Sinners, the first movie he would direct under the banner of Proximity Media, his production company. Following a bidding war, Warner Bros. won the rights to release and distribute the film. Under the agreement the movie’s ownership rights would return to Coogler after 25 years—an unusual deal only heavyweight directors such as Quentin Tarantino had inked before. Coogler also negotiated ultimate authority over the film’s final cut and a percentage of gross collections even before the studio recovered costs. The film reportedly cost more than $90 million.

Coogler and director of photography Autumn Durald Arkapaw filmed the movie by combining two different high-quality formats—Ultra Panavision 70 and IMAX—in service of what Coogler termed “epic storytelling.” In keeping with the subject matter, the soundtrack, composed by Ludwig Göransson, pulled extensively from the lineage of the Delta blues. Besides a personal connection to the blues via his father, Göransson also drew from old records Coogler shared with him, including those of Robert Johnson and Tommy Johnson. Sinners also features several original tracks, including “I Lied to You,” written by Göransson and Raphael Saadiq, and “Last Time (I Seen the Sun),” written by Göransson, Alice Smith, and Caton.

Reception and accolades

Sinners met with overwhelming critical success upon its release, with reviewers commending the film’s performances, music, thematic richness, and fresh take on genre storytelling. It was also a massive box-office draw, grossing almost $370 million worldwide and ranking seventh among the highest-earning films in the United States in 2025. Sinners made history as the first film to receive 16 Academy Award nominations, breaking the previous record of 14, jointly held by All About Eve (1950), Titanic (1997), and La La Land (2016). Sinners ultimately won four Oscars: best actor, original screenplay, cinematography, and original score. Among a host of other awards, Sinners received Golden Globes for best original score (Göransson) and cinematic and box office achievement. It also won three BAFTAs: best original screenplay, best original score, and best supporting actress (Wunmi Mosaku).