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| Title: | Sinners |
| Year: | 2025 |
| Genre: | Horror Musical Drama |
| IMDb: | link |
| RT: | link |
It's been a year plus since I've seen Sinners in a theatre, the film has already had its day at the Oscars (where it was nominated for 16 statues, and came home with 4), and I think the world has by and large moved on and forgot about this piece, but it's been bugging me all this time, and I think I am finally ready to write down my thoughts about it, even if any hot take I may have had is now surely ice cold. On the plus side, because no one is at this point lining up to see the movie, I felt free to make this a spoiler heavy review, which will focus on my small attempts to "fix" some of the core problems in the movie. Having said that:
This first part of the review will be spoiler free. I will provide a clear sign-post before beginning any analysis containing spoilers.
I loved Sinners when I first saw it on the big screen. It is so enticing to get lost in the tastes and smells of the deep south, the rhythms of the bluegrass, and the unique quasi-mystical air of the fictional world of the film. I still want to love it now.
Let's begin with the good. Ryan Coogler has delivered here as director what is undoubtedly his best film to-date, in a long string of progressively improving movies, both in their critical acclaim and their mass market appeal. He burst on the scene with the low-budget critical darling Fruitvale Station (2013), starring Michael B. Jordan. Jordan, even then, at age 26, was already a veteran of 14 years of acting, some of it quite high profile, but Fruitvale Station changed the trajectory of both their careers. For Coogler, it crystallised the theme of what was to become his entire career: he became the director who takes concrete, well-established genres and reinterprets them from the lens of the modern African-American experience. He did this with boxing films (and "Rocky" films in particular) in Creed (2015); he did it with superhero films (and Marvel films in particular) in Black Panther (2018) and its sequel; and now, in Sinners, he attempted it with horror films (and vampire flicks in particular). For Jordan, who, as stated, was even in 2013 an established actor, this was an elevator to worldwide fame and success, because he became Coogler's mascot, appearing in every one of his subsequent films as director (counting Black Panther and its sequel as a single project) and even some of Coogler's films as producer, and Jordan's career was buoyed up in tandem with Coogler's.
For Coogler, mashing up horror films with the black experience would have been particularly challenging because this turf has already been spoken for by another director, whose field of expertise is even more specific: Jordan Peele, whose directorial career (Get Out (2017), Us (2019), Nope (2022)) is entirely about recasting horror film tropes in an African-American lens. To solve this conundrum and allow his film to find its own unique space, Coogler decided to mash up in Sinners not just the vampire genre with the African-American experience but also movie musicals with African-American music.
The result is what I believe is the first Hollywood incarnation of all-singing, all-dancing vampires, and that premise alone is enough to guarantee that the resulting film, good or bad, would at the very least be interesting to watch — a promise that I can attest Coogler has delivered on handily.
The film's gorgeous cinematography of its mythical, mystical south earned it a well-deserved Oscar statuette, as did its musical soundtrack, which needed to lift much of the story's weight.
Moving on to less happy matters, the remaining two Oscars Sinners got away with, best performance by an actor in a leading role to Michael B. Jordan, and best original screenplay to Ryan Coogler, I found a lot less deserving.
Jordan's dual role as the twin brothers "Smoke" and "Stack" is barely adequate, let alone memorable. As stated earlier, Jordan is by now a highly experienced actor, and I think throughout his career he has done better work, more deserving of recognition. His villainous turn as Erik Killmonger in Black Panther was a nuanced and layered performance that greatly elevated this film, even against the backdrop of the rest of its stellar cast (which included many amazing talents, both veteran and up-and-coming, such as Angela Bassett, Forest Whitaker, Andy Serkis, Daniel Kaluuya, Sterling K. Brown, Martin Freeman and Lupita Nyong'o — four of which have Oscars to their name and one an Emmy). Here, when playing twins, the critical part of the performance would have been to accentuate the differences between the two brothers, and yet he never does. Had the wardrobe department not clad one of them consistently in red and the other consistently in blue, and had the script not differentiated them clearly in what they have to say (although much less in how they say it) and in how others relate to them, I don't know that I would have been able to tell them apart. (Side note: I have read much online praise about how Michael B. Jordan was able to subtly convey the differences between the brothers. I challenge anyone to watch a black-and-white, dialogue-free clip of Sinners and tell me which of the brothers Jordan is playing in the given scene.)
But it is Coogler's writing Oscar that I really want to discuss here.
I went to see Sinners following some very good reviews from certain YouTube film critics. Because of their take of the film, I came in expecting a parable where vampires act as all-too-obvious stand-ins for white supremacists. I was pleasantly surprised to realise that this was not the case. I mean, yes, of course you can and are supposed to have that interpretation, at least in certain parts of the film, but it's the less important interpretation (and is less needed, narratively, because white supremacists are present in the script in person, and require no stand-in or allegory for their presence). What Coogler has decided to go with is, instead, a far more interesting direction: because he wanted to tell a story about musical vampires against black music, the vampires in this story are better interpreted (as was done, e.g., by YouTube's "Honest Trailers") as stand-ins for record labels.
For what, for most of its runtime, is a horror film, Coogler's script seems uniquely uninterested in the vampires as killers. His vampires (like all vampires, really) are mainly interested in turning others into vampires. They do not so much kill the bodies of their victims as they, famously, suck out their souls. In Coogler's script, the vampires suck out the soul of the bluegrass music from its performers, and this is only partly a commentary on colonialism; mostly, it is a parable on the destruction of culture, community and heritage by the hands of commercialism and commoditisation.
This, to me, was a very interesting angle to take, and it was brought home most clearly by a speech given by the antagonist, the alpha vampire, Remmick, the Irish, in response to hearing words of Christian prayer by the humans trying to survive his attack. (The script carefully avoids using crosses against the vampires, and this praying is the closest we get to Christian symbolism being applied in an attempt to ward off the attackers.) Hearing this prayer, Remmick says: "Long ago, the men who stole my father's land forced these words upon us. I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort. Those men lied to themselves and lied to us. They told stories of a God above and a Devil below. And lies of a dominion of man over beast and Earth. We are earth and beast, and god. We are woman and man. We are connected, you and I — to everything." Although this speech takes some decoding, at its heart it frames Remmick himself as a victim of colonialism. He portrays the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Ireland, and the Catholic church that was brought in as a result, as the destroyer of his native Gaelic culture, the culture of the Irish Celts, and of its Druidic religion, which emphasises oneness-with-nature. Not only is he saying that colonialism is equally destructive, no matter what skin colour is under its boot, he is pointing to the dogmatic, uncompromising Catholic Christianity as the real villain of the story. His words say that while today the Irish are devout Catholics, much like the African-American of the American South congregate in churches and find their solace in the words of a black preacher and in the music of a black choir, in both cases this is a case of the church uprooting the original cultures and original belief systems of a region, replacing them by those of invaders. As opposed to your typical vampire, terrified of the cross, Remmick merely advises that the path of the Christian god is part of the colonialism trap, part of the cultural disembowelment that is the real vampirism.
And if Coogler had merely left it at that, had merely written a coherent, well-structured narrative around this one, standout idea, this would have been a full-four-star film, and I would have been giving it a standing ovation.
The problem is that Coogler's script isn't that at all. It is a mishmash of a great many plot-lines that start, meander for a bit, and are then forgotten. If they are at any point revived, it's as though Coogler had in the interim completely lost his train of thought, and is returning to the plot-line sans any context, causing nothing to fit together. It's the kind of thing one expects from an AI, not from a human writer, and certainly not from an Oscar-winning script.
This leads the film to be a frustrating experience, in which every scene taken individually is wonderful, and one can easily get lost in the sights and the sounds and lose oneself in the inviting voice of the film, but as soon as one tries to stop and think "What is this movie actually about?" everything falls apart. The strands do not fit together. They do not coalesce into any kind of whole, much less into one that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Moreover, individual plot points look more like things that were added because "scripts typically have these plot points" rather than because the plot-lines need said plot points. Quite often, if one examines individual scenes not on their own merits but rather in terms of their contributions to the film, their inclusion seems bizarre at best. Again, these are hallmarks of an AI script.
While I will stop short from actually insinuating that this Oscar-winning script was (at least in its initial draft) AI-generated — because I have no facts to rely on in this matter — I will ask anyone who is absolutely convinced that it was a work of human artistry this: tell me two quotable lines from the script that stuck in your mind after seeing the film.
In total, there's certainly much in this film that I can recommend, but the more time I spend thinking about it, the less I think that I can recommend it as a film. No matter how much I want to love it, taken as a whole it just isn't a good film.
To exemplify this more clearly, however, I will need to actually dig down and analyse the script itself, and for this we will have to start discussing specifics. For this reason:
Note: From this point on, this review will be spoiler heavy. I will analyse in detail specific scenes, plot-lines and twists. If you don't want to read it because you want to avoid spoilers, that's just fine of course, but if you don't want to read it because you haven't seen the film and feel that such a detailed analysis will be lost on you because you will be missing background: have no fear; I will explain here everything you need to know. If you do want to avoid spoilers, please skip directly to the section "Final thoughts" where I discuss my conclusions following the detailed analysis.
I don't want to be too harsh on this film. I want to fix it. And given how much of the great film that this could have been shines through, one wants to believe that with only minor adjustments the film's problems could have been solved. So, let's try fixing the plot. As mentioned, there are many different plot lines, and these do not intersect. Let's start by taking the most fleshed out and most coherent among them and examine it.
This first plot line is the story of Sammie Moore, a young musician whose 1932 Dobro Cyclops resonator guitar serves as the entire voice of the film, representing its themes of cultural legacy and artistic expression.
Our story begins in the opening scene, where an omniscient narrator voiced over a slideshow presentation tells us that rare musical talent can (a) connect past and future, but also (b) attract evil. This style of movie opening is endemic to science fiction and/or fantasy tales, where we, as audience, must quickly learn the rules of the universe of the film so as to understand the action and the stakes without "As you know, Henry" expository dialogue to explain it. It's the function of the opening crawl of such films as Blade Runner and Gattaca. My point is that it's an effective tool that is used even in highly respected films. So, it would have made perfect sense to have it here if it had served any of these functions. But it doesn't. The entire slideshow is meant to explain to us only a single scene, midway through the film. None of this stuff matters to the plot at all, and none of this stuff is relevant in any capacity whatsoever either before or after this one scene.
I wanted to go over this particular story-line according to its presentation order in the film, but let's make an exception by discussing this one midpoint scene first, as I would argue that this single scene is the tent-pole on which the entire movie hangs. First off: what is this scene in question?
Let's begin with its place in the narrative: a midpoint scene happens not only in the middle of a film's runtime, but also at the seam between the two halves of its second act. It is the place where the instigating incident that kicked the film off runs its course, reaching its logical conclusion, and where the film pivots to a new plot-line whose conclusion is where the movie terminates. Often, it is the place where the main antagonist and/or the main conflict is introduced. All these descriptions are present and correct for the midpoint scene of Sinners: the plot of the first half was of young Sammie receiving his big break, securing a public performance at the hottest new juke-joint in town, and gradually overcoming his apprehensions and feelings of inadequacy until finally, in the midpoint scene that is the culmination of this plot-line, he casts off his doubts and delivers a performance for the ages, setting free the incredible talent that was hidden inside him; as promised in the opening narration, however, this performance attracts evil, in our case namely in the form of a vampire, and the second half of the plot is about the ever-shrinking number of survivors in the juke-joint fending off the attacks by the ever-increasing number of vampires.
Connecting these two plot-lines is Sammie's performance, which is directed 100% like a music video. I have often lamented the current Hollywood trend in which film directors start their careers by directing music videos, and then end up directing entire films as though they were long music videos, much to the detriment of the films in question. Ryan Coogler is not one of those directors. Never once had he directed a music video... except it looks like he really wanted to on this one occasion. Sammie is singing the Oscar-nominated song "I lied to you", while around him the juke-joint keeps transforming, hosting performances of musicians representing both the past and the future, until finally the entire juke-joint seems to go down in flames, Sammie having figuratively and literally "burned the house down", at which point everyone in the joint becomes visible to the vampires outside, attracting their attention and kicking off the second half of the film.
All fairly standard stuff, you may say... until one stops to think about it. You see, films may have acts that are distinct, but they must still form an overall cohesive narrative. So, for example, Sinners is cohesive in its consistent theme of intergenerational cultural legacy, but the cinematic and metaphorical language it uses to tackle this theme switches from part to part: the first half is a coming-of-age period drama, the midpoint is a fantasy about music bridging time, and the latter half is a vampire story. The strands from each of these three never cross to the others.
What would "fix" this? Well, you might think that it's possible to treat music consistently as only metaphorically bridging time. That would omit the need for the prelude, would simplify the one midpoint scene, and will otherwise leave the film intact. Right? Except that doesn't work, because in the film's final act music never features; the script somehow never managed to figure out how Sammie's firmly held cultural identity, as embodied by his music, could defeat the (literal) vampires. If Sammie was to even just stab Remmick with his guitar, that would have been better, but the script never got there.
The far better alternative is to commit to the fantasy nature of the narrative and treat the power of music throughout as literal magic (and, to be clear, the film, in said midpoint scene, is quite explicit about it being an actual connection between past and future, for example by depicting an ancient Chinese musician together with the black ones, because one of the people in the audience is of Chinese descent — interpreting this appearance metaphorically would require the film to insinuate that Mississippi delta blues was influenced by Chinese music, which I don't think it tries to claim). In this alternative, the prelude scene clearly sets up the narrative as a monomyth: music is "the force" which our young protagonist must master (with the help of an older mentor figure) and with which he will ultimately vanquish evil. Once again, the writer of the script, human or AI, seems very well aware of this common structure, and even sets up a mentor figure for Sammie. This is played by Delroy Lindo, who got a "Supporting Actor" Oscar nom for this role (although, in light of what I'm about to explain, this nomination feels less like an award for his performance here and more like a form of a lifetime achievement award).
Now, don't get me wrong: I love Delroy Lindo; I think every movie would be better if there was more Delroy Lindo in it. But the same script writer that placed the mentor figure in Sammie's path didn't seem to know what to do with it once there. The mentor is supposed to teach the protagonist about their shared power, and if Lindo's character, Delta Slim, had done that surely there would have been no need for the prelude slideshow at all (for comparison, Star Wars famously has a very long scroll to set up its world, but that scroll makes no mention whatsoever of "The Force"; that is left for Obi Wan to introduce). Instead — perhaps because in that part of the narrative the power of music is treated as figurative instead of literal — all Lindo does throughout the film is tell some harrowing stories of the fates endured by the black community in the old south. The most effective of these is told while the two are in a car, and just as the story ends we see the car pass an all-black chain gang, working.
In any sane movie, that chain gang, highlighted by the cinematography, would have been a Chekov's Gun. Instead, it is here just part of the "vibe" that is imparted by the elder Delta Slim's words. And this, unfortunately, is what characterises the film as a whole: it is a "vibe" film, never concerned with the coherence of its own plot or narrative structure, but only with the momentary emotions induced by its imagery.
All right, that's enough about the midpoint. Let's go back to considering the film in the order in which events are actually presented. So, we considered the opening slide-show, and concluded its basic fix is simply to omit it altogether, replacing it by more meaningful interactions with the mentor figure. The following scene, being the first live action scene in the film, is also a prelude: it is an out-of-chronological-sequence scene, towards the end of the film's chronology. This is also a common trope for this kind of film. The purpose of such a scene is to allow the film to build up its stakes slowly, by providing us with a glimpse of just how bad things are about to get later on. Typically, this would be a scene raising in the audience's mind two types of questions: "How did it come to this?" and "How will the protagonist manage to prevail now?"
In the case of Sinners, the scene depicts Sammie bursting into a church in the middle of service. The service-goers gasp as they see him, dishevelled and injured, clutching his guitar. As the camera zooms in on him, we, the audience, are treated to multiple jump-scares, in the form of second-long insert shots, match-cutting Sammie standing at the entrance to the church with a shell-shocked Sammie, standing in darkness, his face lit by off-screen fires, the air around him filled with screams. The pastor, as shocked by Sammie's appearance as anyone else but quicker to return to his senses, pulls Sammie in, to the front of the church, where he begs him to accept Christ into his heart, and for god's sake let go of that broken guitar he is still clutching as if for dear life.
On its own, this is a great scene, and on its own, it is very successful in eliciting at least the first of the two types of questions such a scene should invoke. We, the audience, are immediately in the thick of it, trying to puzzle out what all of this means, and how it all came to be. On the other hand, the scene doesn't work in conveying that there is any conflict to be resolved now, which such a scene typically would. The typical chronological placement of such a scene in the narrative (whether examined as a monomyth or as a Dan Harmon story circle) is after the protagonist returns from the fantastical world back to his home, and it is where we, the viewers, get to see how the experience he has undergone changed him. Typically, the narrative skips back after this scene to its chronological beginning, and only at the very end of the film do we return back to this scene — except this time knowing the answers to the "How did it come to this?" questions, and having these answers prepare us for the "How will they prevail now?" answers to come.
When I first saw Sinners, my guess, upon seeing this scene, was that when we will finally come back to this scene, at the end of the film (and we do), there will still be an outside threat looming on the community, whether of some vampiric nature or of a more natural kind. To bring the theme of community full circle, I thought that young Sammie, who was going to be initially presented as a follower (and he was) will gradually, through the machinations of the plot, learn to become a leader, until ultimately, upon returning home but with his community still facing some danger (let's say from non-supernatural white supremacists — which, indeed, is at this point in the narrative largely still the case), Sammie will use this opportunity to rally the scared citizens, and together they will drive the aggressors away.
Though such a plot line could have, potentially, been arranged, it would have required too many changes to even work within a "fix" such as the one described here. In the actual movie, Sammie's actual "community", the one he truly belongs to, is the one that was attacked by the vampires, and of which nothing is left. We have no real connection with these church-goers, and Sammie has very little left to save at this point.
This brings up the real problem with this flash-forward scene: when we come back to it, at the end, none of our questions regarding it ever get adequately answered. Why did Sammie even go to the church? (At the end of the reprise scene, he leaves the church without another word.) Why was the preacher so concerned with Sammie letting go of his guitar, which was clearly lending him comfort and emotional support? (Again, not another word is said in the reprise.) Why, for that matter, was Sammie clutching this guitar for dear life? (There are meta-narrative reasons for this, but no in-world explanations.) What, for that matter, is the meaning of the jump scares? (Are they about what the church-goers are experiencing when looking at Sammie — in which case it should have been conveyed through acting and direction, rather than through flashbacks — or is it about Sammie being haunted by his experiences — in which case, why is this reaction so isolated: everywhere else, Sammie seems hurt by his experiences, but true scarring of his psyche will take much more time; he hasn't yet even processed what has happened to him.)
In short, it is another wasted scene, not connecting to anything else in the narrative. What it seems to hark back to most directly is the idea voiced by Remmick that the impact of church on the black community is that of a colonialist oppressor. Presumably, our takeaway from this scene is that Sammie is rejecting this opium-for-the-masses, and is, instead, holding onto his music, which is the only real connection he still has left with his people, his community which has just been destroyed. Unfortunately, there is never any follow-up to Remmick's statement, and unfortunately the guitar never re-appears at all in the second half of the narrative, so, again, the narrative strands never connect, as though the script was written by someone completely unable to maintain narrative cohesion beyond the boundaries of any single scene.
Moving onto the film's third scene, we are finally at the film's true exposition. We are once again at the church (the story cycle's home base, and a narrative mirror to the earlier scene) except this time we are far earlier, chronologically, at the start of the film's events. Once again, this is a confrontation between Sammie and the pastor, except this one, despite being only a day earlier, is with a much younger-looking, wide-eyed Sammie facing a far kindlier pastor. Sammie is excited about the opportunity to perform at the new juke-joint on its opening night, and the pastor, in return, frames Sammie's excitement as a choice between playing the lord's music and playing music for sinners, and in doing so delivers the film's only quotable line: "You keep dancing with the devil, one day he's gonna follow you home."
As is by now a repeating theme, this is a wonderful scene in isolation, and a complete miss in context. The purpose of such a scene (in any sane script) is to introduce to the audience the main theme and the central conflict of the film. It hints at the overall story arc that we are about to witness. As one watches the film for the first time, not knowing what is to come, it makes perfect sense: the pastor, Jedidiah, just introduced the film's main conflict (should Sammie play hymns or work in a juke-joint) and hinted at the upcoming plot (dancing with the devil will get the devil to follow Sammie home). In a sane script, this sets us up to a plot where Sammie's cavorting with "sinners" triggers evil, which he must then face, a confrontation in which he grows as a person, changing from someone who is guided by what he wants (to have fun at the juke-joint) to someone who accepts what he actually needs (which is namely to use the power of his music in service of a worthy cause that brings his community together). The slideshow scene has already told us the mechanics of how Sammie's music will awaken this evil, and the flash-forward scene has already placed us at the heat of Sammie's conflict. Except, none of that ever materialises. Sammie's choice is never mentioned again. The flash-forward scene is not about Sammie using his music for god's work, but about him putting his guitar down altogether. Worst of all, Sammie's cavorting has nothing to do with the evil that later befalls the community. To run us quickly through what actually happens:
First of all, the vampire Remmick appears on the scene long before Sammie's playing. He is
introduced to us as having escaped from native Americans who are chasing him, but who are then chased
away once Remmick finds sanctuary in a white couple's home. This is a scene stolen beat-for-beat
from John Carpenter's The Thing, which, again, is not something I would expect in an Oscar-winning
script. (Doing it once is forgivable as a homage, but the script does it again in later scenes,
too, to the point that it's a little embarrassing. Not to worry, however: both Coogler's script and his
direction steal from reference many other sources as well.)
So, the vampire was doing his evil work regardless of Sammie, and would have attacked the community regardless of Sammie. But wait (I hear you say): had it not been for Sammie, perhaps the vampire would have stuck with attacking the white community, not the black one. Perhaps it is Sammie's playing that made the devil follow him, specifically, home. To which I answer: perhaps, but it is not the sinning in the juke-joint that attracted the vampire; it is Sammie's playing. Had Sammie been playing a church hymn with equal passion and commitment, Remmick would have attacked the (much less defended) church.
Ironically, there is a separate story line, which we will go over shortly, involving the twins Smoke and Stack, where one can argue that Smoke and Stack brought evil home with them to their quiet Mississippi delta community because of their past sinning. When it's time to discuss that plot-line I'll argue that it's even less coherent than the one we're discussing now, but the preacher's warning is, if at all, relevant there. So, why isn't he saying it to Smoke and Stack, who are right there, outside the church, in that very same scene?
One can perform such scene-by-scene analysis throughout the film, and the conclusions never change. I've already discussed the introduction of the mentor figure, only to leave that mentor figure with nothing to do. I've already discussed the midpoint scene, which is supposed to tie everything together and instead connects nothing. I've already talked about how Sammie's music is never mentioned again between the midpoint and the reprise of the church encounter, and that this reprise is the only other time, beside Remmick's aforementioned speech, where church teachings as something to be rejected is ever discussed. So, let's talk briefly about the second half and then fast-forward to the end of Sammie's conflict with the vampires, to see how it all concludes.
As mentioned, at the end of the midpoint scene the vampires discover the juke-joint, and are interested. Now, recall that the whole purpose of the first half — and the midpoint scene as its cap — is to bring all the chess pieces to where they need to be for the second half. Somehow here, however, the film manages to squander away all of its world-building, all of its character-building and all of its conflict setup. This was supposed to be a film about community. The vampires were supposed to be attracted to Sammie because of his music. What does this mean about the second half? It means that the second half should have been about the vampires trying to reach Sammie, specifically, not caring about anyone else, and for Sammie to have been protected by his community, putting all of them in the line of fire. None of that is actually what happens. The vampires seem completely uninterested in Sammie and his music, and are picking whoever they can out of the crowd, whenever they can, even when the people in question are simply trying to run away.
One of the only times in which the vampires show any interest in music is in what is perhaps among the film's best scenes. In it, the vampires perform a spirited rendition of the Irish folk song "The Rocky Road to Dublin" as a taunt to the people holed up in the juke-joint and as a contrast to their sombre 1930s Mississippi delta blues melodies. (The film's core premise regarding the vampires is that they cannot enter a place to which they were not invited, and they haven't been invited to the juke-joint, at least not as a collective.) The YouTube film commentator Patrick H. Willems chose this song to be the best film song "in a non-musical" for 2025, and proclaimed that he might be biased because it brought him back to his (second generation) Irish roots. I found that comment hilarious, because it so completely misses the point of the song: the vampires are portrayed as soulless; they envy Sammie his ability to connect through music to the past, present and future of his culture, because they, themselves, share no such connection to humanity. As a metaphor to commoditisation, their rendition of "The Rocky Road to Dublin" is meant to be a soulless replica, a canned reproduction of an Irish song which was emptied from its cultural significance, context and meaning. It is designed to be a hip-wagging, thigh-thumping tune that gets stuck inside your head and repeated, spreading like a virus... or like vampirism. It is the pseudo-Irish song, devoid of roots and repurposed for mass consumption. (Side note: the very fact that this film is "a non-musical with musical numbers" is yet another testament to its meandering nature, unable to commit to any direction or stick to any consistency.)
Which brings us to the final scene. In the actual film, this is a let-down, disappointing beyond belief. Like all vampires, Remmick cannot stand the sunlight, and when dawn finally breaks he bursts into flames, as does his entire cohort. It is unclear how this evidently intelligent being who has survived so far for ages seems completely unprepared for the eventuality of sunrise. No coffin at the ready; not even an alarm clock to warn him of sun-up's coming. The whole film becomes at this point an exercise in wasted potential (despite each individual scene being gorgeous to look at).
So, let's fix it. Let's provide an ending that actually carries the film's themes, such as they are, to their inevitable conclusion.
To set the scene, recall that in our version the vampires are targeting Sammie specifically, and Sammie is knowingly being protected by his people. As in the actual film, we assume that any survivors of the night thus far are only due to the vampires' inability to break into the juke-joint without invitation, and as in the actual film, we'll assume that the final showdown comes at a point where the juke-joint can no longer serve as a sanctuary.
If I am to be given free reign here, I would choose to burn down the juke-joint at this point. This is the only logical conclusion, given that we saw it burn up during Sammie's performance of "I lied to you" at the midpoint scene. Fire is also a symbolic purifier, which would serve as a much better backdrop for the vampires spontaneously bursting into flame upon dawn. It would also work much better to explain the jump scares in the flash-forward scene, and most of all, it would deliver the basic narrative purpose of the scene: it would mean that neither humans nor vampires have anywhere left to hide, and there is no other choice at this point than to have the one final confrontation. (In the actual film, in order for it to serve in the other two plot-lines we'll discuss, the juke-joint does not burn down, and to me that is a metaphor for how these other, overlapping plot-lines have nothing to do with the main film, and only stand in its way.)
So now...
In my "fixed" version, the vampires are now descending on the remaining population. These people have had their chance to escape, and have chosen to remain in order to protect Sammie. He is one of their own. They are community. But that community would not be able to survive for long. They will all die for Sammie, and then the vampires will get Sammie anyway. All is lost.
Except now, in my version, Sammie takes a step forward. He is not just protected by the community. He has made his choice, and wants to protect them, instead. Remmick advances to get him, but stops when Sammie picks up his guitar. Sammie begins playing, and Remmick licks his lips, listening.
It is the culmination of everything Sammie's music can do, connecting to generations and generations of his ancestors, and Remmick wants to drink it all up. He can connect to that power momentarily, he knows, by biting Sammie and turning him into another vampire. But then the moment will be gone, and he will be alone again. He relishes this moment. He listens, mesmerised, as Sammie shows him more and more, all the while Sammie slowly detaches himself from the crowd, leading Remmick away, leading the other mesmerised vampires away, allowing the crowd to get themselves to safety... except there is no safety and they know it, and they, too, are rooted to their spots.
Finally, Remmick has had his fill. Finally, he is ready to attack, but it is now too late. Sammie's playing has lulled him for too long, and now the rising sun hits his skin, and he bursts into a hurricane of flame, with the other vampires, his own descendants, following immediately after.
... and that's all there is to it. It doesn't take more than that to bring together the themes of music, cultural identity, community and heritage, to tell the story of the danger of severing music from its cultural roots (which the vampires do, but also commercialisation and capitalisation), and to tie that in with a completion of Sammie's arc of growth as a person. And when all of that is done, it delivers a satisfying climax to the plot. Why Coogler's actual script doesn't do this is beyond me.
This is not to say that they couldn't have been part of the plot, if we had wanted to fix it that way. We already positioned Sammie as Luke Skywalker and Delta Slim as Obi Wan Kenobi, but Smoke and Stack could have easily filled the role of Han Solo. They certainly fit the part of lovable rogues, and their deeds and misdeeds do indeed fuel much of the plot. But to become Han Solo embodiments, they need the appropriate arc. They already start in the right place, scoffing at Jedidiah's sermons to Sammie, and they already show (mostly through dialogue, not through action) that their opening up of the juke-joint in an old sawmill that they bought wasn't an act of caring for the community but a selfish operation meant to fill their pockets. Now, to fix their arc, we just need to bring all that to a head in the final (now fixed) confrontation. I see them taking up the opportunity that Sammie has given them to flee, slinking away while all others are frozen to their place, listening to Sammie's final musical crescendos. But then, just as Remmick is coming in for the kill, I see them coming right back, redeeming themselves, and buying Sammie the last few precious seconds that he needs until sunrise, even at risk to — potentially even at the price of — their lives.
Alas, none of that happens in the actual film. Here, Smoke and Stack are involved in two separate plot arcs, one before the midpoint, one after, which are not only unconnected to each other, but are also individually far more disjointed and incoherent than even Sammie's story, which we analysed above. I'd like to say that the first is a setup with no payoff while the last is payoff without setup, but the truth of it is even worse: both are stories that happen in large parts off-screen or in flashbacks that actively retcon — often in nonsensical ways — incidents that we, the viewers, have already witnessed firsthand, so their setup/payoff descriptions are only true to the extent that we, as viewers, are willing to suspend our disbelief and accept all the retcons, tell-don't-show, and nonlinear storytelling involved.
As this is already too long an analysis (never-mind how long it is for a review) I won't go scene by scene here. In brief, the two plot-lines are as follows.
Look, I've only seen the film once, and it's been about a year since, so I may be forgetting a scene or a piece of dialogue somewhere, but as far as I remember, this film never passes the Bechdel test. There are a few female characters, but their contribution tends to be one note, if anything, and even then usually as a facilitator of trouble. There's Grace Chow, wife of shopkeeper Bo Chow, representing the Chinese community in this small Mississippi town, but without much impact on the actual plot. There's Joan, wife of Bert. They are the white couple that Remmick encounters first, and Joan's part of the plot is trouble: she's the one who lets Remmick into their house, shielding him from the pursuing native Americans. By far the biggest female parts in this film are, however, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) and Annie (Wunmi Mosaku, who was nominated for an Oscar for this supporting role).
The actual relationships between Mary and Annie and the leads is a complex and convoluted one, which I'm not about to unpack. For our purposes, I will severely oversimplify things by saying that Mary is Stack's girl while Annie is Smoke's. Neither description is fair. I apologise.
Mary's role in the plot is a simple one, but raises some interesting questions. Among the joke-joint people, she is the first to be turned into a vampire. She then asks to be let into the juke-joint, is given her invite no questions asked, and then goes straight in to turn Stack into a vampire — after which her part in the plot is essentially done. (Mary is with both black and white ancestry, and the film has some dialogue around that, but it's just one of the many strands that start nowhere and go nowhere.) Now, let's stop to think about this for a second: why did Mary go to turn Stack? The film's A plot would have us believe that the vampires want to get Sammie, and she could have easily done exactly that — there was even some build-up towards it. But she didn't. On the one hand, this completely dismantles the motivations of the vampires with regards to the A plot; on the other hand, like so many other things in this film, on its own merits it's actually a beautiful choice: it tells us that the vampires are not remote-controlled by Remmick (something that the "Rocky Road to Dublin" routine will later challenge) and that the vampires still have the same basic desires, only perhaps much more amped-up versions of the same desires, as they did when they were human. Mary's relationship with Stack was difficult and volatile when she was alive, but now, undead, she recognises how much she loves him, and how much she wants to spend all of eternity with him. I'm going to give the film some props on this one point, not just because it's great within the scene boundary, but also because it's an angle that the film maintains into its dénouement, and, in fact, the dénouement cannot be truly understood without it.
Annie's role, by comparison, is far more complicated. She is the independent woman who would have been seriously offended to be called Smoke's girl. She managed very well without him the entire time he was in Chicago, and, in fact, built her own successful business during this time. She challenges Smoke at every turn, and occasionally gets from him some deeper truths that move the narrative forward. But in terms of direct influence on the plot, I want to concentrate on her profession: she is the town's "healer".
Many years ago, as a young man, I used to spend a lot of time learning about traditional beliefs, mythologies and healing practices. From the looks of it, it doesn't seem like Ryan Coogler spent any time learning about such practices in the Mississippi delta. Is what Annie practices voodoo? Is it hoodoo? What are the defining characteristics of Mississippi magic? For a film that explicitly deals with the mystical and has built its own mythology around blues music, its complete disinterest in the idiosyncrasies of Annie's magic seem baffling. What we know her to make is very generic stuff: "healing potions" which are her core commodity, an "amulet of protection" which she made one of and gave it to Smoke, and later in the film when they want to test who is a vampire and who isn't she makes everyone a garlic cocktail. Yes: garlic. Very inventive and regionally specific. (Side note: the garlic cocktail test is yet another scene directly lifted from John Carpenter's The Thing. Honestly, Ryan Coogler: chill.)
The amulet is what I want to focus on. She claims that it is the reason why Smoke managed to survive all his Chicago escapades without a scratch, to which I have two questions:
In this scene, Smoke arms himself to his teeth, tears off his amulet of protection, and goes to face the Klan members who are now trying to break into the sawmill, and who are surprised to find it locked. Turning himself into John Rambo (the second time in his career that Michael B. Jordan has pulled off a Stallone), Smoke singlehandedly kills every one of the attacking Klan members, until, at the very end, he dies.
Now, there's a whole lot to unpack here. Again, on its own, it's a beautiful action set piece; and again, viewed in context, it's completely unclear why another action scene was even needed here: were the vampires not enough, that we now need to add to them some white supremacists?
There's also the complete lack of logic and motivation on the part of all involved. If the Klan members wanted to attack the black community celebrating at the juke-joint, why are they attacking in the morning, when presumably everyone will have already gone home, instead of coming during the night, like the vampires did, for maximum damage? If, on the other hand, these are humane Klan members, who did not wish to cause any bodily harm, but only wanted to burn the sawmill down as a warning that black people should not have money and possessions — well, then why are they bothered by it being locked? Also: didn't they expect it to be locked, in the morning, after everyone has gone home? And if they wanted to get in, why didn't they bring bolt cutters?
And as for Smoke, he seems to have anticipated all of this nonsense before the Klan members ever arrived, explaining why he is arming himself now, after the vampire threat is already behind him. None of this makes any sense.
But there is one thing that does make sense, and that's Smoke tearing the amulet of protection off his neck. This is a deliberate action taken by a man about to face mortal danger. I don't see any way to interpret it other than as a death wish, and I don't see any way to interpret such a death wish other than as the conclusion of the B plot: Smoke is torn by survivor's guilt, and does not want to go on after the death of his brother, his girlfriend Annie (sorry: spoiler), and his entire community.
To my mind, there was never any real narrative reason to introduce Annie as a character in the first place, other than for this one moment, to show us, unequivocally, that Smoke is committing suicide-by-Klan over survivor's guilt. It's a powerful, dramatic, and tragic ending to the story of the two brothers.
Which is why it's so maddening that the film tries to walk the whole thing back, mere moments later.
But then we have not one but three separate additional scenes: an over-credits scene, a mid-credits scene, and an after-credits scene. Ignoring the after-credits scene (which feels like something the editors liked but didn't know where to put in) which makes no difference to the plot, the other scenes certainly do. I won't belabour the point that it was a crazy choice to place these two remaining scenes where large portions of the audience would have missed them. Plenty of commentators have said that before me. I will add to that only that this film feels like it had to have such post-credits scenes because such scenes are very popular nowadays, and because of that this is exactly the kind of choice an AI would make. But let's examine these scenes now on their own merits:
First, consider the over-credits scene. This shows an adult Sammie, playing blues as part of a performing ensemble. He is played by real life blues guitar legend George "Buddy" Guy, and the scene is meant to be taken as a direct continuation of Sammie's ride into the sunrise: this is where that road has taken Sammie. He has chosen his guitar, and has committed to it. Buddy Guy's playing is entrancing, and, without any special effects, is meant to convey to us the intergenerational links that young Sammie's playing brought to life.
A wonderful, wonderful scene it is. And also, once one takes a second to think about it, completely nonsensical in context: why on earth would Sammie take up a career in blues, why would he be playing his heart out for a living, when the whole point of the film was that this kind of playing attracts evil, and we have seen it destroy and kill an entire community, leaving Sammie as its sole survivor. How does this make any sense?
Then, comes the mid-credits scene. Chronologically, it comes directly after the previous one. Old Sammie has finished playing his bit, goes back to his dressing room, and is then told that he has visitors, and he invites them in. To his dread, the visitors who walk in are no others than Stack and Mary, vampires, both dressed in garish, loud clothing, showing little in the way of taste, though trying to emulate "street" apparel. Sammie is taken aback, but says he's been expecting their visit.
Wait, what? Let me just reiterate the facts here:
This will be the last scene we will analyse in detail, so allow me to say one final time: it's a gorgeous scene — it is well acted (even "Buddy" Guy's acting is effective — the man is mainly a musician, not an actor, but he was hired here to play a fictionalised superhero comic-book version of himself and he does it with gusto), well shot, well lit, well directed, excellent work by the wardrobe department, and dramatically effective... when taken in isolation. Not so much when considered in context.
In the scene, Stack and Mary fill Sammie in on how they are still alive and why they are there. Through flashbacks, we are shown again that Smoke had overpowered Stack in the final sawmill rumble (Side note: how this works remains a mystery to me, because we have previously been shown that the vampires have superhuman strength and superhuman speed) except this time we see that Smoke couldn't bring himself to kill his brother. Instead of violence, we see compassion, and ultimately an agreement is struck through peaceful negotiation: Smoke will let Stack live, but Stack must give his word never to harm Sammie.
Jumping back to the present, Mary explains to Sammie that the two of them are big fans of his, having listened to his performances many times from afar, but only now had the courage to approach him directly.
I have... questions. Some of my questions are regarding the flashback scene itself. For example, it seems here that Smoke decided to protect Sammie; does that mean the rest humanity is expendable? Some questions are regarding the present-day scene. For example: I understand that it takes some time to gather up your courage, but 100 years? The scene also raises many uncomfortable questions regarding the level of autonomy a vampire has on their life choices, and what that means regarding all the other vampires we have seen throughout the movie. But regarding such questions I am willing to give the film a pass: perhaps it was only Remmick's magnetic influence that whipped all the vampires into a frenzy, and with his passing everyone's a lot more cool-headed, life-respecting and committed to fulfilling their promises. Who knows? (If you are wondering, given all this, what makes the two of them still vampires: what the scene does in isolation, and very effectively, is show us that the two vampires have lost their "soul"; they lack, in fact, groove of all form. It is pretty clear that neither Stack nor Mary can keep a beat, and that while they love listening to Sammie's music because it connects them with their past, they, themselves, are "modern", have lost their African-American identity and connection to their heritage, and would not have been able to tell good music from bad. An embodiment of modern record labels, they may thrive on ethnic music, but do not, personally, "dig" it.)
But where the scene completely falls apart for me is when we try to reconcile it with what we've previously seen. Are we now to believe that the other vampires did not spontaneously combust following Remmick's demise? Are we now to believe, instead, that the only reason they all burst into flames is because they were all simultaneously exposed to sunlight? And none of them noticed this? And none of them thought to hide in the sawmill? For some reason exactly the two vampires that Smoke wanted to save happened to be in the sawmill at the critical second, and none of the others?
Worse yet, if one pieces everything together one realises that it was Smoke who locked up the sawmill, wanting to protect Stack and Mary from the assailing Klan, and that his actions that morning were in service of protecting the two of them. Seriously, though? We have seen Smoke with our own eyes removing his amulet of protection before confronting the Klan. If his purpose was not Klan-assisted suicide, but rather protection of his brother, why would he do that? And what was his big plan for how Stack and Mary were to survive after that? And I don't mean "over the next 100 years", not exclusively; I mean: what's going to happen an hour later, when the police arrive at this scene of massacre? Will they not want to open the sawmill and see what's inside, just in case there's more of the crime scene there?
It is a true dénouement, in that following this confrontation Sammie and the vampires no longer fear each other (Sammie knows of their promise, and they know that it's a promise they can keep even if the three of them meet together — in the scene the vampires offer Sammie eternal life, but he refuses it much like he refused eternal life by the church... and the vampires respect his decision) and they can all go their separate ways... but like everything else in this film, the price of making this scene work is to ignore all other scenes in the movie.
Note: I will mention one or two non-spoiler plot-points below, so if you're very squeamish about spoilers you may want to avoid the next part, but you'll be missing the bottom lines. From my perspective everything below this line is spoiler free and I encourage for it to be read as part of the spoiler-free review.
The truth, as I've now said many times, is that Sinners is a gorgeously shot film. The direction, cinematography, lighting, wardrobes and acting are all top notch, all done by people who clearly gave their heart for this project, clearly believing it to mean something. Scenes that should contrast do contrast; scenes that are meant to rhyme together do. It's a film that fires on all cylinders, and it's difficult to see it and not be impressed by the craft. Ryan Coogler took a wild swing in a direction that could have gone either way, and he ended up hitting a home run. I wish there were more films regarding which I could say even half these compliments.
Allow me to explain.
A script is in many ways like a car. As a passenger, you don't have to know about any of its many moving parts in order to get with it from one place to another. But you trust the car manufacturer to know exactly what each part does, and why they are there, and how they fit together, and you expect none of that to be coincidence, but rather careful design, based on a great deal of background knowledge. Script writers rely on a whole lot of theory, which they study carefully, as well as a whole lot of intuition that is built up on top of this theory. The job of a film analyst is to peel back the shiny exterior, reveal the interior moving parts, and work back from the final product to how it manages to work its magic. In the case of Sinners, our investigation revealed a mess. Films progress from one pivotal scene to the next, each meant to contribute meaningfully to the overall narrative. Theory tells us where to expect which pivotal scene. (The book Save the Cat! alone lists 15 such pivotal plot points.) In Sinners, each time we expect to see a particular pivot, what we actually get is a scene that looks perfectly like such a pivot, but has none of the pivot's actual function. It's like finding inside your car all of the parts you expect a car to have, but all of them are somehow slightly warped and unable to connect to any of the other parts they should interact with. That would feel strange, like the car came out of a Petri dish and was never designed by engineers.
I have said before that I will not insinuate that the script was written by an AI without any facts to back me up, but I just can't imagine a human being writing this way. If you were to ask me about the to-me-most-plausible explanation, I will say that Coogler probably experimented with many different prompts, expanding on topic, themes, genre mix, time, location, etc., until he got an AI to write him a satisfactory scene-by-scene breakdown. I don't believe the full script was at any point written by an AI, because I don't think modern AIs are as yet good enough to pull off a script like the one Sinners has, but I do think Coogler could have taken each scene in his breakdown individually to a randomly chosen minimum-wage (or unpaid) intern, for them to fill out the dialogue. With only a little bit of script-doctoring on Coogler's part to ensure that the characters' overall voices don't stray too far, he could have pulled it off.
The script just doesn't make dramatic, narrative or logical sense, once you spend even a moment thinking about multiple scenes together.
"Wouldn't someone have picked up on this at some point in the production?" you ask. Maybe, maybe not. It's quite difficult to pick up on such things before the film is edited together, by which time one is already in post-production and things become too late to change. I expect someone along the way understood this, and I expect that someone else (maybe the same someone) decided: "Who cares? The audience will all be too busy concurrently watching YouTube Shorts on their iPhones to notice." In the end, this is a commercial product. Tell a Hollywood executive that you're in the business of creating art, and they'll show you the door.
Remember "The Rocky Road to Dublin"? That musical number was a parable about the cultural misappropriation that the vampires of the film are doing, and it got me thinking. It got me thinking about the generic culturally-nonspecific depiction of the town healer, brewing generic potions and protection amulets, and how as much as Ryan Coogler said he wanted to shine a light on 1930s Mississippi delta blues through the film's mystical lens, he didn't seem to care much at all about the actual mysticism that was practised in the same area at the time. It got me thinking how the Oscar-winning 1930s Mississippi delta blues music of the film was actually brand new and written by Ludwig Göransson, a white Swedish composer (who has previously written, among other things, the music for Coogler's other black-centric films: Black Panther, Creed and Fruitvale Station). Even the black people in the cast and crew have little to no cultural connection with Mississippi delta blues. The Oscar-nominated song "I lied to you" was co-written by Göransson and Raphael Saadiq, a dude from Oakland California, just like Coogler himself. Michael B. Jordan was born in Santa Ana, California, and raised in Newark New Jersey. Delroy Lindo was born in London and still considers himself British. Wunmi Mosaku was born in Nigeria. Miles Caton (who plays Sammie) was born in New York. Hailee Steinfeld was born in California to an Ashkenazi Jewish father and a Filipino, African-American, British Isles and German mother. Saul Williams (Jedidiah) is from New York. I could go on.
In linguistics, a "meronym" is when a part of something represents the whole. I think that much as the "The Rocky Road to Dublin" routine represents the cultural misappropriation of the vampires as a whole, the vampires represent this movie as a whole, culturally co-opting 1930s Mississippi delta blues despite having no roots in it.
And then it dawned on me: the film is the real vampire, taking the pained experiences of a culture, putting them through a blender, and spitting out a sanitised, committee-approved, soulless product, that still sings and dances like the real thing, but is entirely hollow on the inside.
The film, as it turns out, is a brilliant metaphor... for itself.
And the terrifying thing is that this film, which we needed to analyse in such depth in order to discover its true nature — indeed, we needed to invite it first in — is itself a meronym for the wider Hollywood film industry as a whole, which has turned away from actual storytelling and is now purely in the product-pushing business, the soulless the better (as how can anyone object to anything that takes no stand?) and is presently welcoming and embracing AI, wanting nothing to do with pesky writers, let alone auteurs. The fact that this film's screenplay won an Oscar is not hilarious, it is not a testament to the irrelevance of the Academy Awards — it is a terrifying road-sign, pointing to the way the entire industry is heading.
And I fear that even that globally visible decline is nothing but another meronym, this one for the reckless injection of AI everywhere, in all industries, with absolutely no regard to its actual capabilities, and to what we are losing in the process.
I didn't know, when I began writing this review, that this is where Coogler's metaphor will lead me. The fact that this film got me there is an absolutely brilliant feat on the part of the film (though almost certainly not a feat intended by any of its creators). It is also a terrifying abyss that is dead-staring right at us — the ultimate, real-life vampire.