Sinners: The Power of Connections

Frann Michel

Sinners
A film written and directed by
Ryan Coogler; distributed by Warner Brothers; 2025.

SINNERS IS THE best big-budget American film of 2025. Ryan Coogler’s widely-admired historical-musical-vampire drama is technically and aesthetically ambitious, historically attentive, and musically capacious. Moreover, its exploration of racial capitalism improves on the liberal-imperial vision of Coogler’s Black Panther films (2018, 2022), even as it omits possibilities of political change in the system it indicts. (Caution: spoilers ahead.)

The first part of the film is mainly a realistic portrayal of the Jim Crow South; the second part makes the horror of that world supernatural.

The hinge between beginning and ending, between historical drama and monster action, is a scene signifying a hinge between worlds, between past and future, and signifying the transcendent power of music as “sacred,” as “ritual,” as “magic,” able to link the living and the dead and the not yet born, to connect people to ancestors and descendants.

This power of connection is what the film’s main vampire seeks: a way to connect again with his lost past community.

Filmed in both IMAX (65mm) and 70mm by Autumn Durald Arkapaw (apparently making her the first woman Director of Photography to work in both of these formats), Sinners has shown in different formats according to the projection capacities of different theaters. It’s now available to stream, but certainly worth seeing and hearing with the best audiovisual provisions accessible.

Black Bootleggers in Historical Setting

Set in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, Sinners follows twins Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (both played by Michael B. Jordan), World War I veterans who worked with bootleggers in Chicago before returning to their hometown with Irish beer and Italian wine and stolen money, leaving the white ethnic gangsters to blame each other.

To open Club Juke, a place for African American music, dance and recreation, the Smoke Stack twins buy a disused mill from a white businessman who turns out to be a KKK Grand Dragon. They arrange to buy groceries and a sign from a Chinese couple, Bo and Grace Chow (Yao and Li Jun Li), who run two stores in town, one for Black and one for white customers.

To cook food for Club Juke, the twins recruit Smoke’s estranged love Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a Hoodoo practitioner whose knowledge proves useful in fighting vampires. To play music, they hire Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) a hard-drinking, ex-convict piano and harmonica player, and their young cousin Sammie “Preacherboy” Moore (Miles Caton), who plays a guitar the twins gave him before they left town.

Sammie’s musical talent draws the interest of vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell), born in Ireland sometime before English Christians took the land from his pagan family. We first see Remmick chased by Choctaw vampire hunters, and finding refuge and recruits in the home of Klan members Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke), who ignore the warnings of the Choctaw about their unexpected visitor.

In a review at Bright Lights Film Journal, Misty Avinger argues that this early scene of discounted Indigenous knowledge, and the subsequent exclusion of Native Americans from the narrative, suggest the settler colonialism undergirding the rest of the film’s history.

The filmmakers did work to make the historical setting accurate, not only hiring Choctaw actors (Mark Patrick, Jay Wesley, Eric Willis), but also consulting experts on Choctaw culture — as well as consultants on Chinese Americans in the South, on African American spiritualism and Hoodoo, on twins, on gambling, on histories of the Mississippi Delta, and more.

In presenting its historical setting, the film provides numerous references to the exploitation of Black labor and the violent enforcement of that exploitation. We encounter, for instance, the sight and story of sharecropping and chain gangs, and a description of a lynching and castration.

The African American Intellectual History Society has published a “Sinners Movie Syllabus” on their website, with resources on relevant history and cultural contexts. These resources address not only the stories of oppression and exploitation but also traditions of response, resistance, and solace, including materials on African spiritualism and Christianity, as well art, poetry, literature, foodways, and of course music.

There’s a lot of sky in this movie: spectacular widescreen scenes of cotton fields under sunrise, blue skies, and twilight: evocations of the longing for freedom, grounded in backbreaking labor.

The AAIHS reading list, unlike the film, also touches on the organizing of African Americans in unions and communist movement during the depression, with works by Robin D. G. Kelley as well as Glenda Gilmore’s Defying Dixie. (For additional works, one might consult Alan Wald’s review essay on “African Americans, Culture and Communism” [ATC 84 and 86] or the collection edited by Paul Heideman, Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question 1900-1930.)

Resistance, Survival, Vampires

But in Sinners, traditions of resistance and survival appear not in labor or left organizing but chiefly in music and religion.

Sammie’s father Jedidiah Moore (Saul Williams) urges his son to give up playing the blues and instead devote his life to God. Recurring performances in the church of “This Little Light of Mine,” an anthem of protest movements at least since the Civil Rights era, remind us of the role of Black churches in organizing for justice. But Reverend Moore’s censoriousness additionally registers the ways that church traditions could also be repressive, and Sammie determines to join the Great Migration away from the South.

One of the opening scenes, before we flash back to the main action one day earlier, shows us Sammie, wounded, dazed, and clutching the broken neck of a guitar, arriving at his father’s church in the morning. This scene intercuts flashes of the vampire attack the night before, which we see more fully later, but that here mainly heighten tension and prefigure horror.

Yet the cuts match the positions of Preacher Moore and the vampire Remmick, suggesting comparisons at least as much as contrasts between them. Both have offered a kind of fellowship and community, each at a price.

The vampires seem to absorb the knowledge, memories and skills of those they bite. Several reviewers have commented on this desire by the white vampire to absorb the talents of the Black bluesmen, allegorizing the ways white musicians and corporations have profited by appropriating black musical innovation.

Commodification and Borrowings

The favorable terms of Coogler’s contract with Warner may ease discussions of the question of white commodification of Black art. He not only got final cut approval but also first-dollar gross points (a percentage of the profits without waiting for the film to make back its cost), and ownership rights revert to him in 25 years.

While these provisions are not new, they are unusual in combination and unprecedented for an African American director.

But as Coogler has also commented in interviews, while there is a story here about the commodifying of Black art, blues musicians have themselves assimilated traditions of Irish and other music.

The first of the film’s several beginnings, before the narrative starts, offers an animated tale of parallel cultural traditions, of “legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future,” noting the Filídh of ancient Ireland, Choctaw Firekeepers, and West African Griots. This “gift can bring healing to their communities, but it also attracts evil.”

This story of music’s supernatural power sets up the grand sequence later in the film, in which the spirits of past and future are evoked by the music. As the camera sweeps in a seemingly unbroken take around the interior of Club Juke, we see dancers and hear echoes of music from Africa and China, from precolonial ceremony through recent hip-hop.

Indeed, the film’s aspect ratio changes in this scene, expanding up and down to a squarish (1.43:1) rather than wide screen (2.76:1) view, thus also allowing greater depth of field. The music expands the film’s world — temporally and visually.

The other major musical number using this IMAX ratio is of the multiracial crowd of vampires singing and dancing to an Irish jig, “The Rocky Road to Dublin.”

Although some reviewers (the usual suspects) have indicted the film as “racialist” or anti-white, Sinners visually and narratively recognizes both parallels among cultural traditions (Filí, Firekeeper, Griot) and the borrowings among these traditions. And of course the film’s composer is Ludwig Göransson, whose ability to create and curate blues music Coogler rightly trusted would not be impaired by his Swedish heritage.

But while Remmick appeals to kindred experiences of suffering — alluding to English colonization of Ireland and revealing truths about the cruel plans of the local Klan — his promises of “fellowship and love” are undermined by his involuntary recruitment.

Those exploited and oppressed may become oppressors, as those bitten by vampires may become vampires. These cycles may also be hinted at in the multiplicity of the film’s beginnings and endings, as well as in references to familial violence (the twins’ father beat them so badly that they killed him).

As Rachel Stuart has noted in an article about the film at The Conversation, “The Rocky Road to Dublin” tells of an Irish man traveling to England, exchanging one form of suffering for another, whereas if Remmick were “truly offering freedom” he might have chosen “a song of liberation, such as ‘Oro Se Do Bheatha Bhaile,’ which was the rebel song sung by the republican army as they overthrew the oppression of the English during the Easter Rising in 1916.”

Exploiters and Exploited

Without the hope of revolutionary transformation of an unjust system, such as offered historically by communist and socialist organizing, the best hope is to change positions within the system (to exploit rather than be exploited) or to escape it, as into spirituality or art.

The film shows the twins’ response to exploitation is to seek to exploit others. The irredeemable Klan leader is a major landowner, and the first vampires we see are white, but the Smoke Stack brothers are themselves attempting to develop a capitalist venture — built, like all such ventures, with stolen wealth.

Although Club Juke is an oasis of Black creativity and communal recreation, it is also meant to be a profitable business. Stack’s first reaction to Sammie’s playing is “Whoo! We gon’ make some money!”

Smoke asserts that “all money is blood money,” but also believes that money can buy power, a view challenged by the return of the Klan, or by the story Delta Slim tells of money tempting the Klan to lynch its holder.

But when many of the Club Juke patrons start paying with wooden nickels and paper plantation scrip, the club appears headed underwater financially. Stack’s former lover, white-passing Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), offers to go talk to the white people (the vampires) whom they’ve turned away, to find out how much money they might bring in.

Remmick has gold coins “from another time and place,” but despite Mary’s rejection of the strangers, her trip outside gives them the chance to turn her, and she becomes the first vampire in Club Juke.

Where Black Panther gave us (in keeping with the Marvel Universe tendency to glorify American empire) a CIA agent as one of the good guys and proposed (in keeping with bourgeois liberalism) philanthropic social services as a solution to racist urban disinvestment, Sinners does recognize that Black capitalism is still capitalism, and deadly.

Vampires, Capital and Transient Freedom

Marx famously used the figure of the vampire to describe capital: “dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.”

David McNally in his book Monsters of the Market has argued that the gothic figures pervading Marx’s work also refer more broadly to the occult dimensions of capital as a system that makes work invisible. Horror emerges from the denigration of the physical inherent in the notion of abstract labor, and of value as an abstraction from the physical form of any commodity.

Other interpretations of vampires highlight their relation to sexuality, and some diverge from emphasizing only horror. While the vampires of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) figure the horror of repressed desires returning, a more recent tradition reflects the modern embracing of desires.

At least since the 1970s there have been stories of vampires who are sympathetic figures for those considered monstrous by the mainstream society. This is also the tendency of many African American vampire novels, in which blood-borne longevity offers healing rather than soulless evil, including Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, and works by Tananarive Due.

While some vampire stories suggest vampires lose their souls, in Sinners, the vampire’s “soul gets stuck in the body — can’t rejoin the ancestors, cursed to live here with all this hate.”

Sinners resists the abstraction of value by showing us labor: there is at least one close-up of cotton-picking, as well as several medium and long shots of the sharecroppers’ work. There is also a late flashback montage of the labor of setting up the club, as Smoke remembers this while preparing to meet the Klan.

Moreover, Sinners emphasizes the physicality of pleasure. Advertising the Juke at the station, Stack invites folks to come “sweat till y’all stank,” and many viewers have described it as a very sexy film (the many references to oral sex may resonate with the vampire motif).

But although Club Juke provides an oasis of relief from the horrors of white supremacy and racial capitalism, its community is mediated in part through the cash nexus, and the feeling of freedom is transient.

The fates of the twins diverge along the trajectories of these two vampire traditions. Smoke obeys Annie’s wish that she be killed rather than turned vampire, and as he dies himself, he sees her and their deceased child waiting for him in a peaceful and sunny afterlife.

Stack, in contrast, becomes a vampire, free of aging, but not unsympathetic or soulless. In one of the post-credits scenes he and Mary, still together 60 years later, visit Sammie (now played by blues legend Buddy Guy), and we learn Stack has kept his promise to his brother not to harm Sammie.

The film offers the catharsis of seeing Klan members killed, but no vision of working collectively for a better world, except through the magic of art (Sammie’s, or Coogler’s). Still, Sinners is glorious visually and musically, and offers a chance, for just a few hours, to feel free.

January-February 2026, ATC 240