“You Twins?’ ‘Nah, We’re Cousins.’” – Twins Smoke, and Stack (Sinners 2025)
Spoiler-free review:
Rating out of 10: 10. If I permit myself to rank it above 10, it would be far higher, as it truly deserves.
Likes: The world building, the casting, the sets and costume designs, and I deeply appreciate the fact that original material is getting this much traction; it has been too long since we’ve gotten an original film that makes this much traction.
Critiques: No major criticism that matters, Jack O’Connell is a wonderful actor, though, and I wanted to know more about why Remmick is the way he is, and although the movie is not about Remmick, he is the antagonist and the allegory I just wanted to know more about why he thinks the way he does and all the trauma and English colonialism that got him there, though this movie is a black movie and other racialized minorities film centring those racialized people.
Spoiler review:
This film, to be blunt, is less a vampire movie and more a movie with vampires in it. Which, at least to me, is what made this work; it is an original work that invests you in the world and the characters and operates as a part movie musical, part period drama until Remmick shows up in the last third. I also appreciate how Remmick’s Irishness is not used as the but of a joke or caricature, realistic to the period. Remmick and the black main cast are as outcast and othered in America for being none white or the wrong type of white, and the vampire Remmick’s presence in the film highlights how Empire, no matter who does it and why, and white supremacy such as are in the Jim Crow south are the real vampire and the real evil we in society must be vigilent of. Any queerness in this movie is headcanon at this point, as vampires are inherently bisexual, but the entire cast understood their parts and followed through and it was wonderful being a bisexual in the theatre considering such a cast. This film was also remarkably sex positive for a film made in 2025, which was deeply refreshing, and we support morally grey and complex leading ladies like Annie, Mary and Pearline. Ryan Coogler did his genre homework before melding genres and shattering box office expectations. If you have not seen this movie, you absolutely should and on the biggest screen possible.
Follow up reading:
- How The Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev (Book)
- Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition by Yvonne P. Chireau (Book)
- They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers (Book)
- Mississippi’s American Indians by James F. Barnett (Book)
- The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration by Isabel Wilkerson (Book)
- The Mississippi Chinese by James W. Loewen (Book)
- An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States by Kyle T Mas (Book)
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