Some films ask to be watched. Sinners demands to be felt.

Set in 1932 Mississippi and carved from equal parts folklore, music and ancestral memory, Ryan Coogler’s latest is a southern gothic horror film, with the scale of myth and the intimacy of confession. It’s a story about twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, who return to their hometown to open a juke joint and try to outrun their past. What they encounter instead is something older and far less forgiving.

Shot entirely on 65mm and Imax film, Sinners unfolds like a fevered sermon: lush, unrelenting and full of spiritual unease. The land is thick with heat and history, and the blues roll through every scene like smoke through the trees. In Coogler’s Mississippi Delta, the dead don’t stay buried, the music doesn’t lie, and the devil might wear a suit – but he sings in perfect harmony.

For Coogler, this is not just a film. It’s a reckoning.

“This one’s for my grandfather,” he says. “For my Uncle James, who only talked about Mississippi when the blues were playing. This is about memory. And what we do with it.”

That theme of inheritance, of confronting what lives in the blood, runs beneath every frame. Coogler isn’t just building a haunted world; he’s conjuring the emotional logic of grief, guilt and family. Sinners doesn’t position horror as spectacle, but as a system. Something built. Something passed on. Something spiritual and deeply American. Set in the American South during Jim Crow, the film shows Black people still facing racism, prejudice and segregation.

The threat of the Ku Klux Klan and lynchings is still present – but alongside that awful, violent history of America’s racism is another history. The history of Black people’s survival, their traditions and spirituality. Coogler uses these layers not only to tap into the setting and emotion of the characters, but the supernatural and horror elements of the film, which unfurl slowly before exploding onscreen.

“I have loved horror since I can remember, and couldn’t wait to do my own one day,” says Coogler. “It’s the genre that continues to resonate with audiences... but also a genre that comes up when people talk about great pieces of art in cinema. I think that’s because it feels ancient. The first story we probably told around a fire was a horror story.”

For Coogler and lead actor Michael B. Jordan, Sinners is the culmination of a decade-long partnership that began with Fruitvale Station and evolved through Creed and Black Panther.

Jordan credits Coogler for making him believe he could be an actor.

“Coog has the ability to breathe confidence into people,” he says. “This goes back to when we first met and he told me, ‘Mike, I think you’re a movie star.’ At the time, I didn’t think I was. I didn’t know what type of career I was going to have. At that point, I didn’t know if I could lead a film. Fruitvale Station was the first one where I was number one on the call sheet.

“For the most part, every scene, you’re following my character. So, I was like, ‘Damn, it’s okay. It’s all me. I have nothing to fall back on.’ But I remember him telling me, ‘Hey, I believe this and we’re gonna show people.’ And that was the first time somebody ever told me that. And he helped me believe that, too, in that moment, and I have never looked back since.”

STRENGTH TO STRENGTH

Their working relationship has gone from strength to strength over the 12 years since Fruitvale Station was released, and Jordan didn’t hesitate when Coogler called him for Sinners.

“This was my first film after directing one of my own,” Jordan says, referring to his 2023 directorial debut, Creed III. “It gave me a whole new empathy for what Ryan does – how much he’s carrying. I tried to be that second set of eyes. When time’s tight and stakes are high, that kind of understanding lets us move without even needing to speak.”

Jordan’s performance, split between Smoke and Stack, is the kind of layered, soul-wrung work that sticks.

“One brother starts the scene, the other finishes it. They breathe different, they walk different. Some days I’d switch between them three or four times,” he says. “It felt like making my first movie all over again. It pushed me harder than anything I’ve done.”

One of Jordan’s first challenges in portraying Smoke and Stack became making the twin brothers distinct.

“Certain catchphrases, a body position, or a stance is how I began establishing the twins,” the performer explains. “Smoke has a heaviness about him and he doesn’t talk much. Stack is lighter and smiles through his pain.”

From its opening frames, Sinners places the viewer inside the mythic Deep South – not as a place of historical fact, but of spiritual truth. The trees hang heavy. The light seems to drip. There’s something just behind the veil of what’s visible.

“We wanted it to feel like the land was alive,” says Coogler. “Not just background, but memory. A place that remembers what happened and who was lost.”

That haunted, lyrical tone courses through every location, and nowhere more than Smoke and Stack’s juke joint: the film’s beating heart, and the site of its great undoing. Jayme Lawson plays Pearline, a singer who performs at the juke joint. For Lawson, it was vital to focus on the joy, power, artistry and community of Black people in the south, and she frames the entire film as an opportunity to reclaim how these lives are portrayed.

“We get to see these characters living a life that often gets glamourised in a negative way,” she says. “And we get to see their joy and ecstasy. These are sharecroppers, for goodness’ sake. But we get to see them not in that light of labour, but in these moments of pure joy and love. And we get to ride all kinds of emotions with them. They are given certain arcs rarely given in cinema.”

MUSICAL SET-PIECES

Pearline’s performances is merely one of many musical setpieces in the film. Music doesn’t accompany Sinners – it possesses it. Ludwig Göransson, who scored Black Panther, Creed and Fruitvale Station as well as Oppenheimer and Tenet, creates a score that pulses with spirit and sweat, drawing from blues, gospel and field recordings to create something that feels unearthed rather than orchestrated.

“We recorded in Clarksdale, in old churches, under porches,” says Coogler. “You can hear the dust in the notes.”

At the centre of this musical framework is Sammie, played by newcomer Miles Caton, whose performance as Smoke and Stack’s young blues prodigy cousin carries a vulnerability and power that are impossible to ignore. A former touring vocalist with H.E.R. and Coldplay, Caton brings both youth and soul to the part.

His performance of ‘I Lied To You’ is already being talked about as one of the film’s signature moments – a performance with such power, vitality and soul that it literally brings the past and present of Black music and ancestry into the club.

“He performs that song and that scene really shows the culture and the impact of the blues on other genres that come after it,” says Caton. “It shows where things originated and where things would be going.”

While the blues may offer soul, spirituality and salvation for the characters, it’s an Irish lilt that signals danger. Jack O’Connell, star of Skins and Godless, and who most recently played Blake Fielder-Civil in the Amy Winehouse biopic Back To Black, plays the film’s mysterious antagonist Remmick.

Seemingly polite, Remnick appears at the juke joint claiming to be looking for some good folks, good music and fellowship. But he has a dark side that rapidly emerges, threatening to destroy this community, who have already survived so much. O’Connell notes that he found his way into the character through music.

“The music was the key,” he says. “It’s not often you get a script from America that incorporates traditional Irish music – not just popular Irish music, but the real deal, the genuine stuff. So, I had to read that page six or seven times before it sank in – where ‘The Rocky Road To Dublin’ is being sung by Remmick… that was quite surreal.

“Remmick is this almost mythological being – but he’s connected to the music. It seduces people, it lures them in. That was the starting point for how I played him. I didn’t want him to feel evil – I wanted him to feel like a song you couldn’t get out of your head.”

O’Connell’s voice really impresses, as does his guitar playing and dance moves, though the actor is too humble to take the credit.

“We were working with the best of the best,” he says. “We had Ludwig Göransson and Serena Göransson, just experts at what they do with music within film.”

Remnick’s talk of fellowship and love contrast with his darker desires and his targeting of a Black space seem to hold echoes of Christian missionaries, colonisers and even groups like Irish-Americans, who claim solidarity with oppressed people but have enacted and enabled racism against people of colour. These evocations are never explicitly labelled in the film, but add an intriguing layer of meaning.

LOVE AND CONNECTION

But while Remmick may symbolise white violence, the character of Annie represents Black female spirituality and power. Wunmi Mosaku’s Annie is a Hoodoo conjurer who carries the weight of wisdom and grief in equal measure. She and Smoke hold a long and tragedy-stricken history, but when he returns to town, it’s clear the love and connection they share has never wavered.

It was important to Coogler that the female characters be more than ornamental love interests. They are elemental presences. As Coogler puts it, “This story doesn’t move forward without the women. They hold the soul of it.”

Annie’s vocation and the supernatural elements draw from Hoodoo and West African cosmology, treated with detail and respect. Coogler worked with spiritual advisors and scholars to build a metaphysical world that felt grounded, alive and interconnected with the land.

Haunting, in this film, isn’t relegated to the dead. It is embedded in ancestry. In decisions never spoken aloud. In places you return to without knowing why.
This idea of not forgetting the past becomes vital, and even though the film embraces horror’s aesthetic – the shadows, the teeth, the blood – it avoids its clichés. Its monsters are metaphors, its scares existential.

“I wasn’t trying to scare people with monsters,” says Coogler. “I was trying to show what it feels like to be haunted. By family. By choices. By the places we come from… The scariest part of the movie is not the monsters. It’s the feeling that no matter how far you’ve gone, you still might be exactly where you started.”

Coogler concludes, “We brought our best. We brought the music, the spirit, the stories. This film is about what haunts us. And whether we can finally face it.”

• Sinners is in cinemas now.