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SPOILERY (and not brief) THOUGHTS ON THIS FILM:

Hoo boy, reminding myself DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS on videos promoting “Sinners”, because life is too short to start telling inadequate white Englishmen that maybe the reason they don’t understand what the fuss is all about/don’t think it’s a real Horror Movie is that they’re just too damn stupid for the film (and the Horror genre in general).

I just. WHAT THE FUCK, lads? “It’s just a ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’ rip-off!” Nope. It has some similarities, sure - you’ve got criminals and vampires and a bar - but it has COMPLETELY different themes, characters, plotline & values. You might as well compare Hooters to Soul Food. The reason you think “it turns into a comedy” is because you were anticipating the thrill of watching powerful white vampires viciously slaughtering Black people, and your penis is confused and disappointed that the white vampire guy is singing folk songs and doing an Irish jig instead of disembowelling half-naked women.

Spoiler: this is a film where THE ACTUAL MONSTERS are the smug white family men who show up at the end to lynch the Smokestack twins, after relieving them of their money & letting them have their Grand Opening; if you didn’t understand that, and you’re annoyed that the vampire wasn’t a cool rapey shithead like Tarantino’s character in FDTD, then maybe it’s because *you’re the fucking bad guys.*

(I should, in all fairness, add that the comments section is 99% positive, so it is churlish of me to be mad that there are a few nay-sayers. But sometimes I’m churlish.)

Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, I just saw a (white, British) film reviewer friend refer to Mary in his enthusiastic review of “Sinners” as “a well heeled white woman.”

And I guess this is a small thing, but it bothered me, because it would be a different film if she WERE white?

She’s mixed race. She’s not a white lady slumming it like the rich Greek girl in Pulp’s “Common People”: a “well heeled white woman” would be dangerous AF for the twins to have in their juke joint - even a POOR white woman like the vampire musician could get any of them lynched just for looking at her wrong, in this time and place, which is why they turn the vampires away from the door.

Mary is accepted as family by Annie and Cornbread because she IS family - she grew up with them. Her mother was a mixed race midwife who delivered Black women’s babies and raised the twins, instead of trying to distance herself from her roots; given her druthers Mary would 100% rather be with Stack than with the rich white guy. It is down to Stack that she isn’t with him - and Stack, bless him, pushed her away because he knew she could access safety and privilege as the white-passing wife of a white man that he could never offer her.

Her character is a massive Fuck You to cinema’s Tragic M*latto trope, because Mary is not remotely ashamed of her roots, sees herself (and her Black friends and family) as fully human (this being a film about who is human, and who is seen as human, as well as a film about the importance of connection with one’s ancestors) and she doesn’t put on airs and graces. She can move between worlds (as Sammie can, in an entirely different way) because she “passes”, but she isn’t white.

Mary ISN’T some kind of Daisy Buchanan figure playing at chasing the dangerous Black guy; she’s the girl Stack grew up with and gave his heart to, and the best thing he knew he could do for her was to leave.

(Hailee Steinfeld is mixed race; you may parse her as white, in 2025, but women whiter than her were enslaved from birth under the “One Drop” rule, as generations upon generations of slave owners raped new “stock” into existence upon their mixed race slaves, then sold their own light skinned children at a premium.)

All of which is to say: Mary is *not* a self-insert for Nice White Ladies who have Black friends and think they deserve an invite to the cookout, and it was jarring to read her summarised thus. She’s a woman of colour who has “passing privilege”.

There ARE white people in this film, but *they*, not the vampires, are the monsters.

My gut feeling, when the white vampire sought protection from a KKK couple by appealing to their racism against his Native American pursuers, was “oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck, now we’re going to have white supremacist vampires coming after the Black folks! Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.”

But that IS NOT WHAT HAPPENS. 😮🤯

Instead, gloriously, the three vampires who show up, summoned by Sammie’s veil-rippingly sacred and profane musical gift, *genuinely do* want to be family. At first, accustomed to fictional vampires and their bullshit, I assumed this was all just a ruse - but it wasn’t. Remmick reveres Sammie’s gift, and while he’s a predator who is driven by hunger, I think he’s also genuinely looking at his food as friends he hasn’t met yet. The vampires are terrifying, but they aren’t gratuitously cruel.

The white supremacist ideology does not survive the violently imposed empathy of vampiric transformation: instead of Remmick’s little bloodbath resulting in three racist vampires, he reshapes the racists’ worldview: the vampires, unlike the KKK members, absolutely do see the Black and Mixed and Asian people in the juke joint as PEOPLE, and as potential converts. If they are not yet fully equals, that is because of their mortality, not their race. (The lyrics of “Pick Poor Robin Clean” - a song recorded by Black blues singer Geeshie Wiley, which is what they sing as proof that they’re blues musicians - neatly encapsulate the combination of threat and yearning for connection: “oh didn’t that jay bird laugh when I picked poor Robin clean - and I’ll be satisfied having a family.”)

I think Remmick is absolutely sincere when he says “we believe in equality and music…can’t we just for one night all be family?”

It’s just that this involves turning them all into undead creatures of the night. 🤷‍♀️

The vampires are predators - but they aren’t malicious, the way the KKK folks are malicious. The vampires are in fact presented as a dark mirror of Preacher Boy’s immaculately white-clad good church folks, and Remmick as the dark mirror of Sammie’s father - a theme that’s foreshadowed at the beginning of the film, when we see a split second flash of a monstrous figure superimposed over the Preacher who is entreating his son to let go of the guitar.

This is a film about how true monstrousness is a lack of empathy: the real monsters are the ones who sort humanity into Fully Human and 3/5 of Human, the ones who segregate bathrooms and water fountains and buses, the ones who take picnics to lynchings. But it’s also a film about connecting with and honouring your roots (and reaching forward to future generations), and how it is ART that enables us to do this - music, dance, storytelling, movie making. The moment an hour in when Sammie finally plays, and the power of his playing pierces the divide between past and future, life and death, is the moment the film shifts from a beautifully made period piece into something more wonderful and profound.

Remmick wants to drag Sammie into his flock so that he and his hungry souls can evermore share this profound and beautiful connection with the spirits of their ancestors. Otoh Sammie’s father wants his son to channel his gift into church music, so that HIS hungry flock will believe it’s Jesus connecting them to the numinous: Black church channels music’s joyous and transformative unifying power into elevating the teachings of the white missionaries who converted their ancestors to Christianity even while enslaving them, and Sammie knows the good book by heart, can preach chapter and verse, but he isn’t sold on it.

Sammie loves music for music’s sake, and he doesn’t want it to be fettered by the church or limited to the vampires’ bloody family. He survives the slaughter at the juke joint, but he refuses to let go of the remnants of the guitar the twins gave him - his evil, murdered uncle’s beautiful guitar, with which he spun joy and freedom for the hardworking men and women who cut loose that night, and accidentally called up an ancient monster, and ended its unlife too. He knows its terrible power, but he still wants it.

Sammie wants to live, and die, and be a Blues Man, beholden to neither God nor the devil.

I saw BitterKarella’s Midnight Society summarising Sinners with:

Coogler: there's these two brothers who want to start a juke joint
Coogler: but these vampires try to destroy them with the power
Coogler: of extremely lame white music

…and I know the Midnight Society is just a joke, and that Mary Shelley doesn’t really shiv people (dammit) but this still made me 🫠 because (1) the vampires don’t want to destroy the juke joint. They want to join in. And (2) they’re very good musicians, and they literally play a Blues song (very well) to prove they know their stuff, and then moreover the ACTUAL white music in the film is beautiful and powerful too.

It isn’t coincidence that Remmick is Irish. He’s old as fuck, with his long-ago gold coins - he’s from a people who were colonised and dehumanised and starved by their English rulers, whose language was stolen and replaced, and whose religion was supplanted; the folk music for the Irish dancing scene is hauntingly beautiful and explicitly tribal & communal - it echoes the power of the earlier veil-tearing scene, uniting everyone in a ritualistic dance that trembles on the edge of Bacchanal frenzy.

This isn’t a film about Black music being better than the music of other ethnicities; it’s a bloody love letter to The Blues, but it recognises that the transcendent power of music (and movement, and art) dgaf about genre or culture.

…see, and now I’m thinking about TS Eliot’s “The Four Quartets”, which is as dry and white and WASPy a piece of art as you could wish for - but it tackles the same themes of tearing the veil between past, present and future, and the way that great music and art reaches beyond the here and now, and can communicate profoundly without words. Right from the start, it’s reaching for that moment where Sammie pulls the long dead and the unborn through the veil with his voice:

“Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.”

(And it even includes a section in “East Coker” which is directly lifted from the writings of an earlier Thomas Eliot, describing ghosts endlessly retreading cyclical country dances - TS Eliot layering his own word-music with the words of a ghost whose name he bears.)

…idk, I feel like that poem resonates with a lot of the themes of Coogler’s film? Albeit it’s not at all engaged with Blackness or with being dehumanised, which are core elements. But… “Only through time time is conquered” - idk, Ijs I could draw a lot of parallels? It’s a poem I’ve loved since I was in my teens - the sort of poem you need to dive into and just vibe with, without worrying about analysis? I mean, you can get around to analysis (and I did, at Uni) but you don’t NEED to, to love it? Any more than you need to be able to read sheet music to love Louis Armstrong. It’s a fragmentalist fever dream of a poem; it is, in fact, VERY MUCH a stiff-necked white academic cutting loose and making freestyle jazz out of language, weaving in other people’s words and ideas and returning again and again to the same themes and motifs in an effort to talk about tne transcendent power of Art.

http://www.coldbacon.com/poems/fq.html

Otoh I’ve been rereading Ben Aaronovitch a lot lately - and, again, obviously he’s a white guy, so his lens isn’t Coogler’s, but the themes of the power of music and even some of the difficulties of navigating life under Jim Crow (albeit the Harlem jazz scene explored in “The Masquerades of Spring” is worlds removed from Mississippi Blues scene, and Aaronovitch’s Woosteresque narrator is as white & privileged as one could imagine) really resonate with this film? Like - sure, Peter Grant’s brush with white jazz vampires in old London Town is a very different story from that of Smoke & Stack and their search for freedom and power and family and safety, but it’s still interesting seeing the points of similarity & difference?

I haven’t mentioned what a marvel Michael B Jordan is. The whole cast is terrific, but Coogler’s decision to have Jordan play both Smokestack twins is some galaxy brain shit, and (unsurprisingly) the man knocks it out of the park. I knew nothing about the film going in beyond the poster & that it was about Blues & vampires, so the first time we see the twins I was all “yay, it’s Michael B Jordan and…no, hang on, is THAT Michael B Jordan? Or…uh…they look…the same? What? How? 🤔 JFC, Am I one of those stupid white people who thinks all Black people look the same? 😬 What am I…Surely…oooooh, is this TECHNOLOGY? 😮”

It’s so cleverly done, though, both in terms of acting and CGI - and having established that there are two Michael B Jordans, the plot very wisely separates them for most of the first half of the film and lets the man crack on with acting, giving us the chance to learn how to distinguish them.

Gradually we learn that Stack is the more reckless younger brother who
plunges headlong into trouble and drags Smoke after him; we learn that Smoke killed their father, after he beat Stack unconscious, establishing Smoke as the protector. We learn they’ve been gone seven years, fighting in the war then running with Capone up in Chicago: these are not men to fuck with. In telling Sammie how to find the clitoris & how to make it happy Smoke also shows that he’s a ladies’ man; notably he doesn’t use any degrading language in the telling - he isn’t bonding with another man by boasting about past conquests or by framing it as a way of using women (the way a Tarantino character would) - he’s showing off, but he’s doing a kindness to his young cousin by teaching him about a valuable adult life skill that the Preacher won’t have covered.

Then we see him with Mary, and glimpse another slice of his backstory.

By contrast Smoke is the protective older brother: we see his kindness towards the wee girl he hires to look after the truck, and how she goes from instant fear at hearing his name (because even seven years after they left town their reputation for ruthlessness remains) to realising that this serious-faced dangerous man has a streak of sweetness as he sternly teaches her how to haggle. Smoke is a man still aching to be a father; Bo’s enthusiasm at seeing him again, and Grace’s underlying fondness, even after seeing the two ne’er-do-wells he shot up (then left money to patch up) tell us more about the kind of man he is, and then the bunch of flowers, and Grace’s knowing look, tell us more. The scene with Annie is quietly full of both pain and deep affection - and fair play to Jordan, because he has crackling chemistry with both women.

Smoke is PROTEC; Stack is Captain Bad Idea.

(Later, at the club, we see their respective priorities wrt whether they can/should accept wooden plantation money - whether it’s more important to create a safe space for their community, and to give impoverished elders the respect and kindness of being included, or if they should be looking after themselves & ensuring they can balance the books.)

I loved the twins’ entwined narratives. I loved that Smoke respected Annie’s wish to be united with their baby rather than play at eternal double dating demons; I loved that Mary and Stack were shocked and heartbroken when he staked her; I loved that Smoke got Sammie out of all of this alive, and then went to work to ready himself for the KKK shitheads who had laughed all the way to the bank then prepared to lynch the twins (and teach the community not to imagine they deserved joy, let alone safety or respect) as soon as they’d had their glorious Grand Opening. I loved seeing him kill the shit out of them all, delivering righteous dignified terrible vengeance upon them, and I was delighted and surprised that Annie and the baby came to gather him up at the last. That was lovely.

But this film is arguably Sammie’s Coming Of Age story - a bloody rite of passage which transforms him from a boy to a man, as he takes his place on the stage being celebrated as an extraordinary Blues singer, and loses his virginity, and is caught up in a murderous riot, and sees those he holds dear dying in front of him, and sees his precious guitar torn apart as it helps to fell “the devil”. Sammie is the first and last person we see, coming full circle, and then rounding the story off with the post credit Easter Eggs.

And I have to say - not only was that 90s sweater a shock (I can’t wait for the cosplays): it was also viscerally shocking to understand that African American men and women who were in their 80s and 90s in the 1990s (which seems so recent to me 🙄) had lived through those times? That the sharecropping and KK lynching fuckery which had all felt SO far away in time…wasn’t? Idk, maybe that’s just me; I really appreciated the warmth of that final scene with Buddy Guy, and it was nice to see Stack and Mary living their Spike & Dru unlife, but it was also a real “JFC this was NOT THAT LONG AGO” moment for me.

What a gorgeous film this is. (And what a gorgeous, meticulously curated soundtrack too.)

(I would, incidentally, 500% read about or watch Stack & Mary carving a bloody swathe through racists and other assholes across the 20th century.)