Sinners - 2025

Mississippi Delta vampire tale

This is a vampire movie that takes awhile to get around to showing the vampires, meanwhile there is a sociopolitical commentary going on in the details of the script and in the visuals. A pair of a twins, seamlessly played by Michael B. Jordan, return to their southern home town after years in Chicago working for a criminal group called "The Outfit." Now back in the Mississippi Delta they carefully organize and gather the supplies to open up a juke joint while also renewing old acquaintances and loves in the area. This project is not far away from the energy of Andy Hardy and crew setting up a musical to raise funds for a desperate cause, instead in Sinners the director (Ryan Coogler, who also wrote the script) is using the juke joint as an evangelistic vehicle, a way of showcasing the preserving and commenting upon the value of African American music, peopling his visuals with a variety of historical phantasms which are playing various musical instruments and producing music of different types and eras, a special effect of historical education and celebration. In Coogler's telling, music is the true central faith system of African Americans, whether they're aware of it or not, retaining a kind of unassailable "truth," and he contrasts this with a small wooden church of the Delta which has an African American congregation sitting amid a bare building, painted white on the outside, and with white-gowned young children as a chorus (which we do not get to hear) standing in a line by the pulpit, perhaps as an emblem of vulnerability to what the "whiteness" represents.

This arid image is the arena of a battle of soul by one of the characters, Miles Caton as Sammie Moore, a blues guitar player who is in opposition to his reverend father who wants his son to play "proper church music" instead of "devil music." As the film gets started, we see Sammie with a broken and blood smeared guitar neck, which in flashback we'll learn is debris from fighting the vampires that appear later in the story.

These vampires, though, while completely functional in the story as the usual Hollywood monsters after blood, also act as a metaphorical force for, as the script puts it, the forces of religion and culture foisted onto the African American community. To reinforce this understanding, director Coogler goes to pains to make sure we see crucifix objects around the vampires, for example a white-painted telephone pole that shines creepily as a cross in the darkness behind where the vampires gather waiting for their chance to hunt the people inside the juke joint (this could also be a kind of Ku Klux Klan image. We do get to see the Klan later, who stupidly go up against Michael Jordan's violently effective twin fighting force). But it is this clash of religion, dressed up as vampires versus humans, that is not only the central premise of the tale but is the seedbed by which you can understand the film's title a couple of different ways.

When in a moment of crisis about the army of vampires that have the cast trapped inside the juke joint, it is the crucifix wearing Grace Chow (played by Li Jun Li) who, in a rage, foolishly gives the vampires an edge that until that moment had them stumped and playing fiddle music outside in the dark (though Coogler makes sure to have us understand that fiddle music, which he traces for us back to Ireland, is not the music of the vampires, but rather who the vampires once were. As his script tells us, they were another group forced to take on the culture of an oppressive superior force, whether that's a full-blown targeting of Christianity as, in some way, the "devil" of this story, or its just another layer of disguises that the devil uses to oppress people in groups, it is hard to say.

By the time we get to the showdown of fighting between the humans versus the vampires, the story has blurred the exactness of its substory of racial and cultural conflict, and perhaps more exactly, cultural and historical pain. Sinners turns its brain power to building tension over the siege of the juke joint by the vampires, and also settling the scores between characters who either love or hate each other and act it out as the violence escalates (and there's a lot of vampire-movie R-rated bloodletting here, also a ready supply of profanity to fit the expectations of the rating).The logic of the tale also takes a lot of wounds to the neck, but considering how much Coogler's got on his mind in this movie, even with 2 hours and 17 minutes of runtime, it's tough to fit together all these characters and story, embed a pop-art college lecture on racial and cultural politics, a critique of Christianity, a moving slide-show of music history, plus a Peckinpah-style shoot-out with the Klan, too, and then wind it up with an ironic post-credit scene of famous blues guitarist Buddy Guy (playing the aged Sammie Moore) establishing a present day teaser of how everything turned out back in the Delta when vampires attacked Smoke & House's juke joint.

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