Sinners – Movie of the Year 2025
I. Introduction – The Night the Delta Started Singing
Some movies entertain you. Some movies impress you. Sinners got under my skin and stayed there, humming like a half-remembered hymn.
I walked into Ryan Coogler’s 1932 Mississippi vampire fever dream expecting something stylish and intense – Michael B. Jordan, Hailee Steinfeld, Coogler, Göransson on the score, that alone is a stacked enough lineup – but I didn’t expect it to feel this alive. Sinners isn’t just a horror film. It isn’t just a period drama. It isn’t just a musical. It’s all of those at once, spun together into something that feels like an old ghost story told on a hot summer night, with sweat on your back and a song drifting through the open window.
From the opening images, I knew this was going to be one of those “remember where you were” movies for me. The dusty Mississippi roads, the smoky promise of a Black-owned nightclub built in the middle of a system that doesn’t want it to exist, and the slow, creeping realization that something out there in the dark is hungrier than any human bigot – it all hit me in the chest at once.
By the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t thinking about box office or Rotten Tomatoes scores, even though the film would go on to dominate both critics’ lists and awards discussions.
I was thinking about souls. About cycles. About the cost of carving joy out of a hostile world. I was thinking about the way Michael B. Jordan’s eyes shifted between the two brothers he plays, how Hailee Steinfeld’s presence felt like a lantern in the dark, and how the music wrapped itself around every scene like smoke in an old club.
Sinners is my Movie of the Year for 2025, not just because it’s technically brilliant, not just because the cast is stacked, but because it felt like sitting through a sermon, a concert, and an exorcism all at once. It reminded me that movies can still surprise us – not by being louder or bigger, but by being stranger, more specific, and unafraid to bleed.
II. A Horror Musical in the Mississippi Heat
Trying to describe Sinners in one sentence feels almost impossible. On paper, you can call it a period horror film set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, centered on twin criminal brothers returning home to start a nightclub for Black patrons, only to collide with a supernatural evil.
That’s technically true, but it doesn’t capture the way the film moves.
The movie breathes like a musical, sermons spilling into songs, songs bleeding into violence, violence dissolving into moments of tenderness you don’t see coming. Shadows stretch across wooden floorboards. Neon-bright stage lights cut through cigarette smoke. The Delta feels less like a backdrop and more like a living character, a place where faith, hunger, and history circle each other like dancers who’ve been stepping on the same wounds for generations.
Watching it, I felt the temperature in the theater rise. Not literally, obviously, but emotionally – the way Coogler stages the musical numbers, the way Ludwig Göransson’s score weaves through the old spirituals and original songs, the way the camera glides and sways as though it’s part of the band.
This isn’t horror that hides in the corners. It stands right at the center of the stage, smiling with sharp teeth, and then asks you if you’d like to dance.
This is why Sinners is my movie of the year for 2025.
