Following an intriguing teaser, here’s a longer look at Ryan Coogler’s upcoming ‘genre fluid’ vampire flick Sinners, starring Michael B Jordan.
There are plenty of reasons to be excited about the landscape of cinema in 2025 but the return of Ryan Coogler to original filmmaking has to be close to the very top. While he might have created one of Marvel’s most enduring heroes in the form of Black Panther and sculpted events from the Rocky films into a fascinating new franchise in the form of Creed, we haven’t seen Coogler tell a completely original story since his 2013 debut, the utterly compelling Fruitvale Station.
That’s just one of the reasons why anticipation for the April release of Sinners is so high. Add in too the fact that it’s a vampire film that Coogler has described as ‘genre fluid’, that it features a double performance from the film’s star, Michael B Jordan as twin brothers, and has a great supporting cast featuring Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, Wunmi Mosaku and Jack O’Connell.
We saw a shorter trailer revealed earlier this week, but the film’s official second trailer is now here and you can check it out below.
The synopsis for the film goes as follows: Sinners follows twin cousins, Elijah and Elias (Jordan), ‘who try to leave their troubled lives behind and head south, after spending years in Capone-inflicted Chicago. They return to their hometown, where slavery was recently abolished, but the KKK still looms large.’
The febrile cultural conditions make for a perfect backdrop to a vampire movie, even if Coogler has been keen to point out that the film is more than just another bloodsucker-centric flick. Jordan is never less than absorbing whether he’s a boxer, a special forces operator or a lawyer and we’re looking forward to seeing how he takes on the unique challenge of playing dual roles.
We’ve seen Nicolas Cage, Tom Hardy, Lindsey Lohan and more try it in the past and with digital effects being what they are these days, we wonder if the film’s cinematography (lensed by Autumn Durald Arkapaw) will look to stretch the boundaries of such setups, which are often confined to lots of alternating single shots. We’d argue it worked out pretty well in the examples cited above, but it certainly makes for another intriguing element in a project that possesses plenty of them already.
Sinners releases in the UK on 18th April 2025. Here’s that trailer…