Sinners (2025)
Director: Ryan Coogler
Screenwriter: Ryan Coogler
Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Miles Cayton, Jack O'Connell, Wummi Masaku, Jamie Lawson, Omar Benson Miller, Buddy Guy, Delroy Lindo, Peter Deremanis, Lola Kirke, Li Lijun, Saul Williams, Joey Pang, Andre Ward-Hammond, Helena Hu, Tenaj L. Jackson, David Maldonado, Adeyin N'Karade, Sam Malone, Jaquan Monroe-Henderson, Percy Bell, Emmonie Allison
Genre: Drama / Action / Thriller / Horror
Production Country/Region: United States/Australia/Canada
Language: English
Date: April 16, 2025 (France) / April 18, 2025 (USA)
Duration: 137 minutes
Also known as: Sinners/Sinners (Hong Kong)
IMDb: tt31193180
Adaptation: Inspiration
Summary:
In 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, identical twins and World War I veterans Elijah "Smoke" and Elias "Stack" Moore return after working for the Chicago Outfit for seven years. Using money stolen from gangsters, they purchase a sawmill from landowner Hogwood to start a juke joint for the local Black community. Their cousin Sammie, an aspiring guitarist, joins them despite his pastor father Jedidiah's warnings about the sins of blues music.
The twins recruit pianist Delta Slim as a performer, local Chinese shopkeeper couple Grace and Bo Chow as suppliers, field worker Cornbread as a bouncer, and Smoke's wife Annie as a cook. Annie believes her Hoodoo practices kept the twins safe, but Smoke doubts them for not preventing their infant daughter's death. Stack runs into his white-passing ex-girlfriend Mary, who resents him for abandoning her out of protection. Elsewhere, Irish-immigrant vampire Remmick shelters from Choctaw vampire hunters with a married Klansmen couple, whom he turns into vampires.
On the joint's opening night, Sammie, Delta Slim, and Pearline – a singer with whom Sammie becomes enamored – perform on stage. Sammie's music is transcendent, unknowingly summoning spirits of both past and future to join the crowd. However, the performance also attracts Remmick and his vampires, who offer money and music in exchange for entry. A suspicious Smoke refuses. The twins realize that their patrons' reliance on company scrip makes it impossible for the joint to be profitable. Reasoning with Stack that outside income is necessary, Mary meets Remmick outside, where she is turned. Returning inside, she seduces and fatally bites Stack. Sammie and Smoke discover them; Smoke shoots Mary, but she is unaffected and escapes. Outside, Remmick turns Cornbread.
Smoke closes the joint early; as the patrons and Bo leave, the vampires turn them. Stack revives as a vampire, but flees after Annie repels him with pickled garlic juice. Annie realizes their assailants are vampires and tells the survivors how to deter and defeat them and that killing Remmick will not revert the other vampires to humans. Although Remmick and his vampires share a hive mind, their personalities remain intact.
Still unable to enter the joint, Remmick tries to negotiate by inviting the survivors to join him, saying that vampirism offers immortality and freedom from persecution. He promises to leave in exchange for Sammie, whose musical skills he wants to use to summon the spirits of his lost community, also revealing that Hogwood heads the local Klan and plans to attack the joint at dawn. They refuse, and Remmick threatens to attack the Chows' daughter Lisa at their home.
Enraged by the threat, Grace invites the vampires into the joint, and a fight ensues. Grace, Bo, Annie, and Delta Slim are killed as a result, while Mary escapes and Remmick turns Pearline. Smoke fights and defeats Stack and then assists Sammie in defeating the vampires, who are all incinerated by the light of the sunrise. Smoke sends Sammie home before he kills Hogwood and his men, but is fatally shot. He reunites with Annie and their daughter after dying. Meanwhile, Sammie disregards his father's pleas to seek salvation and travels to Chicago.
In 1992, an elderly Sammie, now a successful blues musician, is visited by an ageless Stack and Mary after performing at his blues club. Stack reveals that Smoke spared him at the joint on the condition that Sammie live in peace. After declining the couple's offer of immortality, Sammie performs for them. As they leave, Sammie admits that despite being haunted by that night, until the violence, it was the greatest day of his life. Stack wistfully agrees, since it was the last time he saw Smoke or the sun, and the only time they were all truly free.
