Spoilers Ahead!
Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is a ferocious convergence of Black musical genius, vampire mythology, and the inescapable architecture of white supremacy. Rather than asking which of these forces will triumph, the film threads them together in an intricate, combustible network where history, horror, and cultural legacy collide. In many ways, it’s less a question of victory than of survival—who rebels, who assimilates, who burns?
The narrative follows twin brothers Smoke and Stack (played by Michael B. Jordan with such uncanny distinction I found myself squinting at the screen until well over halfway through trying to figure out if they’d just gotten a really good look alike) returning to their hometown in the Mississippi Delta after a mysterious and likely criminal stint in Chicago. With their cousin Sammie, also known as Preacher Boy (Miles Caton), they intend to open a juke joint on a former sawmill purchased from a man later revealed to be a local KKK leader. Sammie, despite his preacher father’s warnings that blues are linked to the sinful and supernatural, joins them eagerly. Their return is a reclamation of land, culture, and community—but it’s haunted from the start.
A little further away, a sizzling white man covered in blood and sores heaves onto the screen. Remmick (Jack O’ Connell) staggers up to a cabin begging for help and is taken in by a white couple. They are warned by a Choctaw band of vampire hunters not to trust him, but the couple threaten them with a shotgun and Remmick, revealed to be a vampire, promptly turns them into the same. Remmick is an Irish immigrant, and through this lens the vampires aren’t just monsters—they are a metaphor for systems of consumption and colonial extraction. Sammie’s music becomes the object of Remmick’s desire for its ability to transmit memory, pain, and spiritual connection across generations.
The film’s structure pivots on a now-iconic juke joint scene, during which Sammie performs “I Lied to You” (as seen on this issue’s playlist). This sequence is a sensory overload: blues rhythms slide into glam rock, tribal percussion, and early hip-hop breakbeats as Sammie’s music works in conversation with the spirits of his ancestors past and present. It’s one of the only film sequences I’ve seen where my mouth involuntarily dropped open and stayed that way until it was over. The choreography evokes the chaotic beauty of Gaspar Noé’s Climax—mesmerizing, frenetic, surreal. But unlike Noé’s detached nihilism, this performance is a call to cultural continuity. Sammie is not simply a performer; he’s a conduit through which history, resistance, and ancestral recall flow.
This spiritual transcendence through music stands in stark contrast to the film’s depiction of white supremacy. The vampires, in their hunger, are analogue to the white supremacists who attempt to suppress, possess, or erase Black life and culture. Coogler makes this parallel explicit: the KKK and the vampires are not separate threats—they are different manifestations of the same colonial impulse. One feeds off blood; the other off power. And both are cursed, soulless, and afraid.
As an Irish vampire, Remmick recalls a time when Irish immigrants were outside the boundaries of whiteness. His tragic longing and musical sensitivity signal his attraction to Sammie’s power as a spiritual figure. Remmick recognizes the immortality Sammie embodies: one rooted not in violence or consumption, but in memory, tradition, and rhythm.
The notion that the construction of whiteness is a national affliction rather than a regional or cultural one is reinforced both through this treatment of “fringe” communities and through Sammie’s naive optimism. When he excitedly asks Smoke and Stack about Chicago, their weary response that they came back to the Delta because they’d rather deal with the devil they know highlights the pervasive construction of white supremacy.
Indeed, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), Stack’s white-passing girlfriend, becomes a vessel for exploring the treacherous terrain of racial ambiguity. Her attempt to straddle identities—crossing in and out of whiteness even though she would rather cleave to her Black heritage—ultimately brings about the downfall of the community. Her character critiques the privileges of passing and the dangers of false solidarity. Her careless alignment with the vampires under the assumption that their perception of her as white would protect her is her undoing, and tragically, the juke joint’s as well.
Ultimately, once he survives the vampires, Smoke sacrifices himself to destroy the KKK, whereas Stack and Mary get their forever, though flawed, ending together. Coogler, drawing a clear line between human evil and supernatural monstrosity, suggests that white supremacy is, in fact, the greater horror: more enduring, more insidious, and more capable of eroding community from within.
The film’s quieter moments are just as powerful. Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) represents cultural retention and spiritual fortitude. She is one of the many who managed to keep their culture and practices safe from erasure, and her first scene feels like an elegy to that. The cinematography is exceptional here; the dappled light, the heavy oaks, the softness, the stillness. Her and Smoke’s connection isn’t sassy and raw like Mary and Stack’s; it’s charged with a weighted electricity, like the air before a storm. It’s beautiful. Eventually, her decision to die rather than be turned by the vampires reaffirms the film’s core ethic: integrity of self and community is worth more than survival under erasure.
In the end, only Sammie survives. But his survival is not escape—it is transfiguration. He doesn’t need vampiric immortality because he’s already achieved something more profound. His music, his connection to ancestral memory, his refusal to assimilate—these are his talismans. As he drives away in the twins’ car, shattered guitar clutched to his throat, it’s clear he carries both loss and legacy.
“Sinners” is a genre-defiant epic, folding the surrealism of Climax, the mythic Americana of O Brother, Where Art Thou? and the righteous fury of Django Unchained into something entirely its own. It is a film about art as resistance, music as lineage, and white supremacy as a curse that ultimately devours even its beneficiaries. It is, finally, a film about what survives when the night ends—and who becomes legend in its aftermath.
I won’t spoil the post-credit scenes, but if you missed them the first time do yourself a favor and go watch it again.
