Late to the Party: Watching Sinners
This review originally appeared in the May 23 and 24 edition of the Courier in Russellville, AR
If you knew me, you’d know that watching Ryan Coogler’s 2025 Sinners thirteen months after its theatrical release is my version of timely. I don’t watch movies for myself often and tend to be far behind in the cannon when I do. But we’ve been on a vampire kick in my house, my kid requesting Hotel Transylvania ad nauseum. To satiate the thirst for comedic vampires without capitulating to another re-watch, we had a recent family movie night with Mel Brooks’ Dracula, Dead and Loving It. So, when I found myself couch-bound after a routine medical procedure, turning on the Southern Gothic vampire-fest felt natural. The kind of vampire movie I could delight in on my own.
The movie opens tensely with a blood soaked Preacherboy Sammie, played by actor Miles Caton, barging into his father’s church, flashes of a dark night sliced in as he stands in the bright white church. After Sammie’s entrance though, we flash back to “One Day Before” and the first half of the movie is daylit and sun soaked. It is not a vampire movie at all.
Notorious gangsters, the twins Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, are back from Chicago, and they plan to turn an old sawmill into a juke joint for, by, and of the Black people in Clarksdale, Mississippi. They’ve come home after years away flush with cash, beer, wine, and ambitions. Rather like a heist movie, they gather a super group and tagalongs together to convert the sawmill. Along the way, they lay a rich scene for what life was like in 1930s Mississippi.
Sammie finds time to play the blues after spending his mornings sharecropping on the Sunshine cotton plantation and against his preacher father’s wishes. Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) works on a cotton plantation too, alongside his very pregnant wife, who urges him to take the twin’s job and promise of more money. Grace and Bo (actress Li Jun Li and actor Yao) are the Chinese owners of a segregated grocery store with operations on both sides of the main street, not Black or white, but navigating the two worlds speaking the common language of currency. Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) is playing days at the train station, juking for money and sipping out of a flask, but understands the limitations of the twins’ offer when they try to buy him away from his usual Saturday night gig.
“I ain’t never heard of your juke. Maybe it’s here tonight, is it here tomorrow night?” he asks them, highlighting the precarity of all they might endeavor towards.
There’s a lot of sorrow in the first half. We find Smoke visiting the grave of his baby. In one of the best moments of filmmaking in the movie, Delta Slim tells a story about forced labor and lynching, the flashback audio playing underneath his telling without the camera cutting away, letting both the telling and the past live together in the same instance, through the different mediums. After Slim finishes the story the men in the car are silent, but then Slim starts chanting and slapping the side of the car and Preacherboy picks up his guitar again. These events are tragic, but this is no tragedy.
The club’s opening is electrifying. In the packed mill people are dressed in their best, a sense of joy and community evident on everyone’s faces. At last, the film’s musicality gets the front and center attention it deserves. When Preacherboy goes up for his performance, the barriers of space and time break. Preacherboy’s music bends time itself, pulling from the past and future simultaneously. He is joined by African tribal dancers, by Afrofuturist electric guitars, break dancers, and a variety of other influences spanning centuries and continents. Sammie plays on, singing his heart out, and in the vision the mill burns around the dancers, the flames engulfing the building without touching them.
So, this is where the movie has its personality split, one of the biggest complaints people offered for the film being an affinity for one side more than the other. For some critics there were too many vampires in their Deep South period drama. For others there was too much racial tension and period drama in their vampire gore fest.
I think there’s some merit to these arguments, mostly around the inconsistent pacing of the film and its inability or unwillingness to trust the viewer to know what’s going on. But still, I like the vampires and, ultimately, I like the film’s duality. I like how they aren’t easily reconciled. Like the twins, they can’t be reduced to one, and they cannot be whole on their own either. There’s a lot that the film is addressing. For the remainder of this column, I can only tackle one thing—so, let’s focus on the vampires. I want to take the vampires seriously and not relegate the second half of the film to a gore-fest. I don’t want to assume that it is somehow unrelated to the first. Vampires are a supernatural outlet for our human fears. They allow us to manifest irrational or inscrutable fears, our repulsion and our desire for competing elements.
In Sinners, Smoke and Stack have the devil they know about, the Klan, and then they have the one they can’t know about until it is knocking on their door and biting their necks. The Klan is a known quantity, an established enemy. What the Klan wants is to see Black bodies broken, if not by labor, then by violence. What the vampires want is something else. The vampires are living bodies without living souls.
While vampire-like creatures date to antiquity and fear of the risen dead seems consistent across cultures, vampires today are derived from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the historical figure of Vlad the Impaler, a 14th century Romanian noble Stoker drew inspiration from. Vampires may be spooky and unrelentingly evil, but they are also handsome, well dressed, possessed of winsome charm, and, most importantly, rich. Dracula is a Count; Vlad ruled the land he hailed from. When unsuspecting Renfield is sent to Dracula’s Transylvanian home it is as a concierge service on a real estate deal.
What I want to suggest is that most modern vampires have close associations to wealth and social class. This wealth and class allow the rich and connected vampire to prey on the poor and lower class, what was the peasantry for Dracula and Vlad. But Remmick, the head vampire played by Jack O’Connell, isn’t from noble stock. He sings Irish songs in an Irish brogue. In the end, he will tell Sammie about how his family was pushed from their land and forced into Christianity and subservience, like Sammie’s people were.
Remmick is referring to the English occupation of Ireland, a long history of strife, violence, and subjugation. The Irish faced systemic oppression when they came to the United States following displacement and famine. The Irish were reviled. They were locked out of opportunity and denied upward mobility in American society. They were mocked and cruelly caricatured in popular media. They were paid less and denied housing. The Irish were not just foreign, but Other. The hierarchy of the social order demanded there were people at the bottom and Black people and Irish people were placed there.
Assimilation is a survival strategy. The Irish “became white,” assimilating into the hegemonic culture around them. To escape subjugation and disenfranchisement, they made themselves into the dominant culture.
Remmick offers that same assimilation and belonging, but through the vampire collective. Above all, Remmick wants Sammie’s music for his own, to take the sound, the rhythm, the very soul of the music, but to rid himself of the actual soul that made it. Remmick wants to own that sound without the heritage; wants the cultural but without the mess of self and history that lies behind it.
The other devil knocking at the door then, the one more secretive than the Klan’s direct and straightforward racism, but just as deadly, is the offer of erasure through assimilation. Of belonging through capitulation, of working oneself into the hegemony through the sacrifice of a creative and sacred selfhood, one connected to the cultural past.
I think this is the movie’s duality too. That it is both a serious period piece Southern Gothic and gory vampire-fest and that both are expressed and informed unapologetically through Black culture. It will not do what we want it to, just because we want it to. It is not a capitulation into easy categorization, but an exploration of self and community. Of what expression and self mean in the context of culture and history. Of the many obstacles that stand in the way of freedom, of one’s soul. The end of the movie starts and stops and can’t seem to settle on a final note, but to me the end of the movie is Sammie driving away, clutching the broken guitar. It is Sammie, choosing his soul when he chooses to keep on making music, when he ties himself to the past and the future, refusing to relinquish the past and culture that made him.
