Ryan Coogler’s Sinners just notched the biggest opening weekend for an original movie since the start of the pandemic, which means the Michael B Jordan-starring, period-set vampire movie will be seen and talked about for weeks (and more) to come. Here are some absolutely spoiler-packed discussion points (seriously, multiple endings are spoiled!) for the film’s variety of layers, genres and readings.
Crime drama v vampire horror
Whenever a movie has an unusual genre mix or bifurcated structure – and Sinners has both – there will be viewers who prefer one half to the other. Coogler’s film is a relatively leisurely crime-adjacent drama for its first half, following brothers Smoke and Stack (both Michael B Jordan) as they attempt to parlay their gangsters’ bounty into a juke joint for their Mississippi community. Then it turns into more of a horror movie, when vampires, apparently drawn out by the supernatural quality of the brothers’ musician cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), show up at the club and try to turn the patrons to their undead army. And the club scenes mean that the movie briefly resembles a performance musical on its way to the horror-action stuff.
The temptation with this many genres in play is often to choose a team: why didn’t they get to the awesome vampire stuff faster? Or, why did ...
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