They say there’s no force in the world like a mother’s love — for better or worse. English thespian Sally Hawkins, whose many roles have included Paddington Bear’s adopted mom in the Paddington movies, puts her zany energy to a different and more unsettling use in this psychological horror drama from directors Danny and Michael Philippou, who brought us the fan favorite Talk to Me.

The deal

Seventeen-year-old Andy (Billy Barratt) would do anything to protect his spirited younger stepsister, Piper (Sora Wong), who is blind. He shields her from bullies and tells her about the things and people she can’t see, often fudging the less pleasant details. But he can’t mute the shock of the day the siblings discover their dad dead in the shower.

Andy insists on accompanying his sister to her foster placement, planning to become her guardian once he turns 18. Their new foster mom, Laura (Hawkins), is a colorful eccentric who lives in a state of creative disorder. She welcomes Piper with open arms, and the siblings soon learn she’s grieving her own blind daughter, who drowned in the backyard pool.

Laura is so effusive and loosey-goosey that even Andy lets down his guard. But then he notices something is seriously wrong with her other foster child, the seemingly mute Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips). And Laura doesn’t seem particularly perturbed.

What Andy doesn’t see, and we do, is that Laura obsessively rewatches a grainy VHS tape depicting a murderous ritual. Its purpose? To raise the dead.

Will you like it?

To people who don’t like the genre, all horror movies may seem equally nihilistic. But if you do like it, you probably recognize a vital distinction between horror that provokes screams of glee more than terror (Final Destination: Bloodlines, say) and horror that evokes existential despair.

The talented Philippou brothers, who got their start on YouTube, are purveyors of the latter. Talk to Me, a clever modern twist on “The Monkey’s Paw” with a protagonist who spirals into supernatural addiction, was unrelentingly grim even for me.

Bring Her Back shares that film’s central motifs of protective guardianship, unresolved grief and mounting delusion. But this time, the Philippous have made the savvy choice to divide those traits between two central characters, one of whom is easy to root for.

Once Andy discovers that their foster mom doesn’t plan to let Piper go, his conflict with Laura propels the story. As Laura’s tactics escalate — drugging, gaslighting, playing the siblings against each other — Andy’s touching and believable bond with Piper keeps us on his side, even when his grip on sanity falters.

We watch in horror, but it’s mixed with pity, because the film’s drifting point of view brings us into Laura’s secret world, too. The bizarre title character of last summer’s Longlegs was more meme than man, not real enough to be scary. By contrast, we’ve all known women like Laura, whose too-muchness teeters on the brink between endearing and appalling. And Hawkins’ unhinged performance connects us directly to her outsize emotions.

If watching this movie feels like bathing in a tub stained with decades’ worth of untraceable filth, that’s not because of anything supernatural. We never learn the details of the ritual depicted in the videotape; no paranormal “experts” pop up to offer exposition. This vagueness allows viewers to fill in the story’s gaps with their own conspiratorial theories — and many have. But the real dread sets in with the realization that it doesn’t actually matter whether the ritual works, only that Laura thinks it will.

She’s a cult of one, ruling over an airless house of madness, and the Philippous use all sorts of disorienting techniques to trap us there with the siblings. Ominous circular motifs repeat throughout the film, penning the kids inside Laura’s domain. Some shots are in extreme shallow focus, putting us in Piper’s place as she navigates a world seen only as light and shadow. Sound often deceives us, too, as voices issue from the wrong mouth.

To call Bring Her Back a downer would be an understatement. Be forewarned: The movie depicts harm to children and animals — more graphic in the former case than in the latter. Phillips, as the mysteriously afflicted Oliver, gives a harrowing performance in scenes that provoke the most primal of cringes.

But the siblings are likable, and Hawkins’ larger-than-life presence contributes continual jolts of energy, much like Toni Collette’s turn in Hereditary. Imagine visiting the quirky home of a creative type — a taxidermied dog! a chicken coop! — and gradually realizing their interests run deeper and darker than you ever imagined. The ritual may be demonic, but the horror here is all human.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) gets 2025’s One Hell Of A Movie award. Free from the confines of franchise filmmaking – although he didn’t fail to show his acumen as a storyteller with Rocky-adjacent story Creed and two Black Panther films for Marvel – he concocted a genre-mashing action-horror-drama about life and death, good and evil, and how music bridges those dichotomies, set in the 1930s Deep South. Oh, and it’s a vampire movie. Coogler produces, writes and directs, once again casting his muse/creative partner Michael B. Jordan to lead the charge. Two things here are self-evident: One, it connected with a passionate audience, grossing $350 million worldwide. And two, you have no choice but to admire his ambition.

SINNERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Music: It can create and reflect joy. Same goes for pain. And as Sammie (Miles Caton) explains in voiceover, It lives right on the thin line between various extremes of the human experience. We meet Sammie in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932. He looks a little worse for wear – bloody, ragged clothes, holding a broken guitar neck, his face slashed and bleeding and bearing the visage of someone who saw too damn much. He’s the son of a preacher (Saul Williams) who warned him about all that, the devil and Hell and yada yada, and all that’s pretty much the too much that he saw. It’s morning, and the congregation’s gathered in the church, gawping at the state of this young man. Then we jump back 24 hours.

It’s a hot day. The fields are full of people picking cotton, and driving past them are Smoke (Jordan) and Stack (also Jordan), twin brothers returning home after fighting in The War to End All Wars, and some further toughening up as Chicago gangsters. They have fat rolls in their pockets and a satchel full of cash, and it’s best not to ask where it all came from. They hand the satchel over to a grotesque, tobacco-spitting white man who lies through his nasty stained teeth that “the Klan don’t exist no more” before giving them the keys to an old sawmill. Smoke and Stack are going to fast-track the building into a juke joint with music, dancing, food and booze. It’ll open tonight, and it’ll be hot and delirious and ecstatic.

And this is feasible because it’s the 1930s in a rural area so nobody has anything going on. Smoke and Stack’s first recruit is Sammie, who can play glorious slide guitar and sing with his big, deep well of a voice that belies his youth, much to his father’s chagrin. They wave booze and cash in front of pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) so he’ll play, too. Storekeepers Bo (Yao) and Grace Chow (Li Jun Li) will tend bar, the burly Cornbread (Omar Miller) will mind the door. Will the woman Sammie’s sweet on, a singer named Pearline (Jayme Lawson), come by? Almost certainly. Same for Stack’s ex, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who passes for White; they have lingering lusty urges to reconsummate. Smoke’s ex, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), will fry up some catfish for everyone – and stir painful feelings, as he visits their baby’s grave.

Now, what’s this party missing? That’s right: trouble. There’s a big difference between fun and too much fun, and Smoke and Stack sure seem to be magnets for the latter. But that’s why this movie is titled Sinners, you know. Midway through the evening, a trio of White folk arrive with their fiddles and banjos, hoping to stir some bluegrass and Celtic flavors into the mix, but they’re met with suspicious eyes. As it should be, since we met their leader, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), in an earlier scene, R-U-N-N-O-F-T-ing from Choctaw vampire hunters, then converting a couple of Klansfolk into fellow bloodsuckers like he, and at this point you’re thinking boy it’s a good thing Annie is a Hoodoo practitioner, so somebody around here will believe what they’re seeing. Anyway, these party crashers want to taste blood in that juke joint tonight. But will someone invite them in?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Sinners finds the sweet spot between Jordan Peele (it’s more Us than Get Out) and From Dusk Till Dawn.

Performance Worth Watching: Jordan continually comes to life when Coogler directs him, and the supporting cast – Steinfeld, Lindo, Mosaku especially – is just as good. But the breakout is Caton, a first-time actor who finds depth of character via his tremendous singing voice.  

Memorable Dialogue: Stack gives a sales pitch for the juke joint that nobody can resist: “Y’all ready to eat? Y’all ready to drink? Y’all ready to sweat til y’all stink?”

Sex and Skin: There’s some rampant horniness here via a few steamy sex scenes, but none of it is particularly graphic.

Our Take: Choose your prefix: over-, uber-, extra-, they all apply. Sinners bursts with style, characters and worldbuilding, and it’s a minor miracle that Coogler corrals it all just enough so it makes thematic, visual and tonal sense. His ideas burst the bag and run in all directions – spirituality and religion, racism, crime, infidelity, trauma, creativity, art and music, social politics. It’s a lot, and I struggled with the uneven pace; the more-is-more narrative tends to sap the dramatic momentum and dilute the suspense. It seems Coogler aimed to generate a boiling kettle of provocation, but it never reaches a roll. It simmers atop a blue flame though, and it’s still hot enough to burn flesh.

I can see fuddy-duddies tut-tutting the potentially awkward marriage of Serious Period Drama with splattery horror, and I say LET THEM TUT. That’s just Coogler’s blacksploitation influence showing. Vampires are forever a rich metaphor, appropriate for a time and place where aggressors accumulated power by extracting the lifeblood, so to speak, from the less powerful – one bite, and you’re Uncle Tom. More compelling, though, are Coogler’s ruminations on the potential for music to illuminate the inexplicable, its place in the social and historical structures of a people. That’s the film’s richest idea, one that the filmmaker could have explored in great detail in a more traditional story, instead of brushing up against it. But that wouldn’t be as much fun.

Coogler spends the first 45 minutes building to the big party, and it takes another 15 for it to get saucy. Sinners truly takes flight when Sammie takes the juke joint stage to sing and strum, and Coogler choreographs a stunning unbroken shot winding through the revelers, inserting musicians from different eras, from African percussionists to Funkadelic-style electric guitarists and Chinese dancers. Such robust storytelling seems incongruous with the inevitable corn syrup-drenched vampire showdown, but Coogler makes it work through force of will, and the ability to make us feel intoxicated with the film’s energy and impressive visionary overtures. Music is love and danger and life. Music is for sinners, and that, of course, is all of us.

Our Call: Sinners ain’t perfect. But you have to see it anyway. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.