In 'Sinners,' the Deaths Feel Like a Metaphor (Review)
Notes on Ryan Coogler’s love letter to the Black South
****SPOILER ALERT FOR THE PLOT OF SINNERS!***
In the 1930s, a Black wannabe guitar player from Mississippi named Robert Johnson stood at a crossroads. It’s there, legend has it, that he sold his soul to the devil in exchange for the gift of playing the blues. He died tragically young at 27, fueling more rumors that the devil had come to collect his due. But the tale of Johnson’s fantastical journey from terrible musician to a seemingly overnight sensation lives on.
Ryan Coogler’s new Southern gothic horror film Sinners doesn’t borrow from Johnson’s story, but it does take the Christian premise that the blues is “the devil’s music” and flips it on its head. In Coogler’s original story—the first and best in his film canon so far—he crafts a love letter to Southern Black people specifically and our generational tradition of searching for and finding freedom through the arts. And I do mean craft. His historic use of both 65MM and IMAX film cameras to shoot the film in the widest and tallest formats possible—also making his cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw the first woman to achieve this, as well—shows the vibrancy of the Black South like we’ve never seen it before on screen and offers a visual feast of Black American culture and a warning of those outside it trying to crash the cookout.
In Coogler’s hands, the blues music of the “sinners” is a holy, righteous, healing thing; both a weapon against white supremacist evil and a salve for its wounds. If we can sing about it, then maybe, for a time, we can be free of it. If we can tell the stories of who we’ve lost, then maybe, in a way, they get to live on.
But survival in this vampire epic is no trifling matter, and who Coogler chooses to let live to tell the story and who he chooses to die feels too much like a metaphor to ignore.
THE HEIST OF FREEDOM
Starring Michael B. Jordan as twin brothers Elijah and Elias Moore in his best performances to date, Sinners tells the legend of the duo, nicknamed the Smoke-Stack twins. Seven years after killing and burying their abusive father, fighting in the trenches as veterans of the Great War and robbing the Italian and Irish mobs in Chicago, Smoke and Stack return to Mississippi with money to spend, buying an old saw mill from a secretly evil white man to turn it into a juke joint. Money is power, and a Black-owned business, they think, can bring them both.
After buying the mill, they pick up their little cousin Sammie (soulful singer Miles Caton in a remarkable debut film performance). Like all the Black people in his community, Sammie is a sharecropper, but he yearns to sing and play the blues. Nicknamed Preacherboy because of his father’s role as a pastor in their community, Sammie is trapped between the cotton fields and the church—two white systems of oppression that won’t let him be who he is. Playing the blues in his cousins’ juke is his way out of pain and oppression, but his father Jedidiah (a powerful Saul Williams) lectures that he should be using his music in service to God at church instead of “dancing with the devil” in the clubs. Sammie chooses the blues “for just one night” and leaves with his cousins, but promises to be back in time for church in the morning.
Pay no attention to the reviewers who call the first hour of this opus “slow;” it’s deliberate. It’s world-building. It’s a filmmaker and a storyteller at the top of his craft. I’ve never been so hype watching the symbolism of Smoke and Stack on opposite sides of their hometown, assembling their rag-tag team of sinnin’ avengers—each with their own conflicting ideas of salvation—all driving towards their common destination: the juke. It’s the hours before the heist and the loot is freedom.
Stack and Sammie pick up local Blues legend Delta Slim (an undeniable Del Roy Lindo), and entice married singer Pauline (Jayme Lawson who is nothing short of a revelation) to stop by and (unintentionally) provoke Stack’s white ex-lover Mary (a devilish Hailee Steinfeld) into coming too. Cornbread (a hilarious Omar Benson Miller) will be the muscle at the door. Smoke enlists the help of the married Chinese couple and local grocers Bo and Grace Chow (a pitch-perfect Yao and Li Jun Li) to bring the food and make the signage, and he picks up his longtime love and the mother of his dead baby to cook the food and otherwise be by his side, hoodoo worker Annie (a regal Wunmi Mosaku who lifts her character to otherworldly heights).
In a sequence that will go down in film history, Sammie gives his first-ever public performance, singing a song he wrote for his dad about how sorry he is to disappoint him, but how much he loves the blues. As the power of his performance builds, his voice and his steel guitar merge on an ethereal frequency, proving that he is a griot, and piercing the veil that separates the physical and the spiritual realm. All heaven lets loose. A West African griot plays the akonting—the predecessor to the banjo—alongside Sammie, as does a futuristic Black man with an electric guitar, showing the evolution of blues music, from West Africa to the Black American South.
Bo and Grace’s ancient Chinese ancestors dance around them too, as an 80s DJ scratches records on a turntable, modern Southern Black girls twerk to the beat, and a West Coast crew walk it out. It’s not just a history of Black music on display, it’s the history of the shared Black musical experience—from the drum circle to the juke to the disco to the club. The power of our gathering in song and dance has existed long before white supremacist oppression and will exist long after we tear their kingdom down.
In the meantime, the club has been the spot where, no matter which evolution of slavery we’re in, we can, for one night, shake it all off and be a little more free.
Sammie’s singing metaphorically raises the roof and sets it on fire; they all let it burn down around them as they dance the night away. It’s a gorgeous scene of community that made it all the more disappointing that there are zero Black queer-presenting “sinners” in the juke. Even Steven Spielberg’s famous juke scene in 1984’s The Color Purple centered the town’s famous Black bisexual griot Shug Avery. Though a Black queer woman wrote the source material for that film, that shouldn’t be necessary for inclusion. Just look around. The roots of blues music lie at visibly queer Black women’s feet. Big Mama Thornton. Ma Rainey. Yet even the vampires—known in most modern lore for their undying horniness and sexual fluidity— are painfully and uncanonically straight in Sinners. When I thought about this, even after my four screenings of the film I can’t stop watching (on IMAX 70MM; IMAX digital, standard 70MM and again in XD), I still couldn’t help but quote Stack’s gripe to Smoke: “no vision!”
But the white devil’s is 20/20, and even from far away, Remmick (a horrifying Jack O’Connell) sees Sammie’s celestial talent and, like a true vampire, sets about trying to take it for himself.
THE DEATH OF IRONY
Once the vampiric bloodshed begins, Remmick eventually reveals to Sammie and the surviving Black folks that Sammie’s voice and music are the reason he’s come to the juke.
“I want your stories. And I want your songs. And you can have mine too,” Remmick, in his full, unmasked horror warns Sammie. When the Master Vampire bites, he can suck up and take for himself all of your memories, all of your traumas, all of your rhythm, all of your blues. Yes, it’s a poignant commentary on the demonic music industry that has been robbing our griots since they discovered they could capitalize on Black music. But Coogler hesitates to put too fine a point on this metaphor of white vampires who suck Black musicians and Black music dry for their own gain. His minister of music for all of his Black-music-heavy films—from the Afrocentric Black Panther score to the Delta Blues of Sinners—is, after all, a Swedish white man.
Ludwig Göransson is without doubt a masterful (heh) talent. I own all of his scores on vinyl and will get this one too. He’s an objectively great composer who, much like an actor, can find joy in stepping into other people’s stories and histories and creating new life. But it’s not lost on me that the opportunity to have a composer tour Africa, to find the music of Wakanda for the biggest Black box office film ever; to connect with something deep and ancestral that was stolen from us, was not given to a Black American composer—or even an African composer. Sure, Black musicians like Senegalese singer and guitarist Baaba Maal, contributed to the music, shared their stories, jammed in sessions, and got paid and credited for their participation in the liner notes. But there’s only one name on the 2019 Academy Award for Best Score, and it’s not Maal’s.
Perhaps, it would be less of a sticking point that the film is scored by a white European man if the thesis of Sinners wasn’t rooted in white vampires co-opting Black music. This was, after all, the motivation for Coogler to demand the near-unprecedented ownership rights to Sinners. The white elephant in the room was stomping like Pearline on that juke stage and I suppose everyone decided to ignore it. The music is great, after all. And yet.
When Delta Slim tells Stack and Sammie the harrowing tale of how his friend Rice was lynched in the train station because white men wanted the roll of money in his pocket, he beats the side of the car in anguish. He wails. And that beat and that holler turn into a song. That’s the blues.
The blues comes straight out of the cotton fields. Straight out of white supremacist oppression of Black people. Straight out of Coogler’s own family history. And it shows. Coogler locked in with his own ancestry and made the best film of his career. You can watch someone else’s people pick the cotton and you can listen to someone else’s people’s stories. You can study it, and give a great impression. But there will always be a distance if you can’t tap into an ancestry, a spiritual tradition.
THE DANGER OF THE “COOKOUT” INVITE
Remmick understood that. He knew his music couldn’t pierce the veil. He needed Sammie. That’s why the image of Remmick’s Black victims-turned-vampires surrounding Remmick and laying their blessing hands on him, anointing him while he absorbs their power, their voices, their music with glee is one of the most haunting images in the film. His Irish ditties drastically improved with their rhythms and chorus. But what did they get?
Sure, it would be wonderful if, like the vampires promised, that we could all “just be family” and play music in “fellowship and love.” We could all do the Irish jig and we could all share the blues. But as long as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy gives money, power, credit and fame to white men at the expense of the Black musicians at the soul of the music, we can never be in true community with one another.
And that may be the strongest lesson of the film.
In a brilliant and historically accurate nuance, Remmick shares with Sammie that, even though Christianity/Catholicism was also forced on his Irish people by their English oppressors just like Black folk, he too still finds comfort in the words of the Bible. It’s the emotional mimicry of an abuser who’s building a false sense of community by highlighting their shared oppressor, while ignoring his current role as one. He seeks to trauma bond with his victims, promising them new life, just as he takes theirs away.
Bo and Grace, the Chinese shopkeepers who can service both the white side of the street and the Black side of the street in segregated Mississippi, were down to make money with Smoke and Stack—until things got real. When Stack is killed, Grace tells her husband to go get the car so they can leave. They signed up for a party, not to support their friend through his biggest grief yet and whatever demons he’s got to fight. Bo agrees, to his peril, and succumbs to vampirism when he steps outside.
Grace, confronted with the loss of her husband and threats against her child, decides against the will of the Black people she’s supposed to be in community with, to invite the vampires in, which leads to most everyone’s death.
And that’s not to let the other villain of the story off the hook, the one whose actions lead to the death of all the people she called “family”: Mary.
When Mary confronts Stack in public at the train station and brings herself uninvited down to the juke joint, she does so without care or concern for Stack’s life—Black men, after all, have been lynched for less than upsetting a white-looking woman in public. Though he tells her on both occasions to leave, for her safety and theirs, she chooses both times to not only endanger Stack but all the Black people around her. When Cornbread lets her in, Smoke and Stack let her stay, and Annie calls her “family,” she’s empowered to further endanger them. This 1/8th Black reverse-Sarah Jane Johnson from Imitation of Life doesn’t “want to be white,” after all. (It’s no small detail that her hair is styled just like Sarah Jane’s). But she’s been living as a white woman in Arkansas, because whiteness is about how you look, just as much as its about who you choose to be in community with, and she can’t help but act like one.
In true delusional Karen fashion, she sees Remmick and his two white recruits as “harmless,” and seeks them out for the money they can provide. Never mind that she’s married to a rich white man and can likely just give the brothers some money herself! No, these three raggedy-looking strangers are the key to the juke’s financial success. It’s a very unserious plan, and just like Remmick’s first victims that day, Mary’s fate is sealed when she accepts the white man’s gold. Cornbread’s is sealed when he lets her in the first time, let alone the second, and Stack’s is sealed when he pockets the gold from Mary (in both ways).
Of course, none of them knew the full consequences of their actions, but there’s something to be said of Smoke, who’s more worried than anyone about keeping the juke afloat, turning the white man’s money down at the door. Amused by Remmick and his folk band, Stack probably would’ve let them in eventually if Smoke wasn’t there to stop him. Once Stack becomes a vampire, he seems to believe without question Remmick’s promises that—in a world that wants to snatch the lives of Black people out from under us—choosing eternal death is actually freedom.
Freedom is the goal, but there are some compromises that Smoke wouldn’t make for it that Stack just couldn’t resist.
Still, Coogler’s vampire lore is not without weaknesses—if Mary was already invited in after she turned, and Stack was already inside when he turned, why do they need another invitation to re-enter? Are the vampire’s a hive mind, enslaved to the Master Vampire and forced to do his will, or do they maintain their humanity, as the end-credits suggest, and have their own agendas? Is Remmick a misguided white savior looking to genuinely offer Black people a better way of “life,” — the klan did show up to kill Smoke, just like he said they would—or is he Jim Jonesing them with promises of equality and love while only wanting to increase his numbers and access to Sammie’s talent? Are the vampires rabid and blood-thirsty, unable to stop themselves from killing their loved ones whom they know don’t want to be vampires, or do they have willpower not to kill, but only if their twin brother asks nicely?—It’s a bit muddled.
But the betrayal of Black folk by trusted community members hits hard. It makes the juke joint scene, when all of the people and their ancestors’ spirits were dancing together, with their own beats, their own traditions, their own cultural garb and style—not in unison but in harmony—all the more tragic when it has to end. Despite how much richer the world is when we’re all together, everybody can’t come to the cookout while anti-Blackness is still on menu. This sense of safe community is just another thing white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy has stolen from all of us.
THE DEATH OF BLACK WOMEN
And I do have to mention patriarchy specifically in analyzing this film, as not a single Black woman character survives the night of vampires.
Pearline, a powerful blues singer and performer in her own right, sees Sammie in danger from Remmick and stabs Remmick in the back with the stake, missing his heart and sealing her own fate. When Remmick bites Pearline and she’s processing the devastating loss of her living life, she pushes away Sammie’s comfort and yells at him to go, leave her behind and make it to sunrise. He’s all that matters.
Likewise, when Annie realizes that hurting Remmick hurts all the vampires (sometimes! This is not a consistent truth!), she turns her back on the vampires so that she can warn Smoke. In so doing, Stack, her brother, for all intents and purposes, lunges at her and devours her neck. “Not you,” she cries, over and over as his drool and her blood mix and drip from his fangs into her mouth. “Not you,” she cries and I felt that in my soul.
In what my friend Janae described as “Chekov’s Promise,” Smoke must fulfill what he told Annie earlier that he would do: if she’s bitten, he would drive a wooden stake through her heart immediately and set her soul free. Through tears, he does it, and that’s how Annie goes: her brother and her lover end her life on earth. Aint that bout a bitch? Like our dire, real-life maternal mortality statistics, Smoke and Stack’s mother died giving these boys life. And just like Annie, in real life, we’re more likely to die at the hands of our brothers, our lovers. It’s bad enough in real life, but even in our brother’s wildest fantasies too? Damn.
Annie’s mojo bags keep not only Smoke but also Stack safe from hurt, harm and danger as they fight in the trenches of the Great War, and rob the Irish and Italian mob in Chicago. When his own brother comes to devour Smoke and turn him into a vampire, it’s Annie’s mojo bag around Smoke’s neck that prevents Stack from being able to bite him. She’s a powerful woman. But why wouldn’t she make a mojo bag for herself? She may not have known about vampires, but she’s a Black woman in the Jim Crow South—surely, she would think herself deserving of protection.
If it’s griots we’re supposed to be protecting, Annie is a griot too. She’s the first voice we hear in the film, narrating the story. She’s the keeper of the histories that help them destroy the vampires. Sadly, the bones have been thrown for poor Annie, and the verdict is that she must die. Why? Simply because she was written that way. She has her rootwork and she can cook, but outside of Smoke, no joy that we can see, no reason to fight for her own life. Why would she want to live when she has a baby daughter (who was also written to die for Smoke’s character development) waiting for her on the other side? She was written to empower others, and Smoke specifically—not to benefit from her own power.
It is heartbreaking when Smoke finally removes his mojo bag before his big showdown with the Klan because, without his twin, he’s ready to die and join Annie, his mission of keeping Sammie safe and killing Remmick now complete. But how I wish the Black man could’ve covered the Black woman like she covered him, prayed for her like she prayed for him, given her life like she gave him life for once!
Annie’s final moment, crowned with baby’s breath, breastfeeding their infant while dressed in all white, is breathtaking imagery and a beautifully crafted ending for Smoke to be reunited in death with his family. It’s a scene meant to evoke the highest emotions, and it succeeds. And still, in the aggregate of Coogler’s most recent films, a pattern starts to emerge. In Creed III, which Coogler created and produced and Jordan directed and starred in, Phylicia Rashad plays Creed’s mother and is sacrificed mid-way through to spark Creed’s character growth, using his grief from her death to raise the stakes. In Wakanda Forever, which Coogler wrote, directed and produced, Angela Bassett’s Queen Ramonda is also wholly unnecessarily murdered to raise the stakes for the other characters. The trope of killing off women for other (usually male) characters’ growth happens so often in men’s fiction that the colloquial term is “fridging” the women. And I have to ask: why, in Coogler’s imagination, is the story more emotionally resonant if the Black women die?
In Sinners, I can understand Sammie being a symbol, not just of our youth and promise but of our stories and our songs. It’s not just the women, but Delta Slim and Smoke who promise to die protecting Sammie and what he represents from the white man’s destruction. Especially as Trump is literally erasing Black history from the archives and museums, the symbolism is not lost on me. How and ever, the avatar for our youth/promise/songs/stories in this film is a Black man, at the expense of the Black women. And that feels very much like something a Black man under patriarchy would believe.
To his credit, before he kills her off, Coogler does center a Black woman’s pleasure through Sammie’s brief encounter with Pearline. Thanks to Stack skillfully explaining to Sammie (and the listening audience too) how to perform proper cunnilingus, Sammie does so eagerly in the only scene that is solely about a woman’s pleasure. As another consolation prize, when Sammie becomes a famous musician, he honors his one-time lover and rescuer by naming his blues club Pearline’s. She’s not there to sing her own blues, but he can sing them for her. Still, the haunted sweetness of that gesture and of Smoke and Annie’s reunion is undercut when we learn in the end-credits scene that something else has survived: the white woman.
Speaking of troubling patterns, Jordan’s first big-screen love interest who’s darker than a paper bag is Mosaku’s Annie. (Yes, I checked, going all the way back to his All My Children days when he was romancing Amanda Seyfried, up to his next franchise, The Thomas Crown Affair with Taylor Russell.) Killing Annie off, then, while showing Stack in the end-credits scene “alive” and “well,” 60 years later with Mary, is hard not to take as another stab to the heart. We cheered when Smoke took out all the Klansmen in the film’s coda, but are we supposed to cheer that the white woman who got all the Black people killed in the first place not only gets to survive, but remain in #BlackLove, on earth forever?
Because Coogler will own the rights, a Sinners franchise has endless potential, now that we know one of the twins has survived. But what has survived with him is a far less compelling love story than Smoke and Annie’s, and a bittersweet answer to the film’s central question: how do we get free?
THE CONSTANT STRUGGLE OF FREEDOM
Before they headed north, Stack thinks freedom is in the Black-owned Mississippi town of Mount Bayou. But the town folk figure they’re just as evil as their dad and run them out. They eventually try going back home, creating a Black space, “for us, by us,” with the white man’s blood money, but quickly learn that was always going to be a slaughterhouse, whether by vampires or the KKK. (Catch that message!)
When the devil has Sammie in his grizzly grip of death, Sammie tries to recite the Lord’s Prayer to save himself. But Remmick and his undead pack recite the prayer along with him in chilling unison. Instead Remmick baptizes Sammie over and over, as he tries to force Sammie to submit to his will. When praying only stalls Remmick, Sammie takes hold of his steel guitar floating in the water and slashes Remmick deep into his skull with it, giving Smoke time to stake Remmick in the heart. The power of Black music, the ancestors, community, tradition and the sunlight of truth and time all work together to send this demon and his pack of newly made vampires back to hell (Though I would’ve loved to have seen the Choctaw vampire hunters and the ancestors from the juke return and join forces with the survivors for the final battle of flesh and blood and principalities of the dark). They’re free of Remmick, but he’s only one shark in a sea of evil.
Back at the crossroads, Sammie stands before his father and the church, chastised, bloody, and permanently scarred. Still, he rejects his father’s label of him and the people he lost as “sinners,” he refuses the call to “put the guitar down” and repent. That guitar saved his life. He’s seen the holy things his music can do, he owes it to the people he lost to tell their stories, and he won’t let any vampiric sources co-opt his gifts for their purpose rather than his anointed own. He leaves the church, and drives to Chicago, choosing freedom through playing the blues. But, now in his 80s, played by legendary Blues man Buddy Guy, Sammie drinks his trauma just like Delta Slim did, and admits to vampire Stack that the best day of his life, when he felt the most free, was the day they made that juke joint, before the sun went down. Stack, who once thought vampirism was the way to freedom, agrees.
In a genius bit of character work, Jordan’s Smoke doesn’t smile the entire film. Unlike his slick and flashy play of Stack, Jordan plays Smoke with public affection and love only for his brother. Though in the end-credits scene, Stack remembers it differently, Smoke doesn’t kiss or hold Annie in public at the juke. He doesn’t speak to her gently. No caressing of her hair or hands. Only when he’s grieving his brother does he allow Annie’s public embrace. Only as he lays dying, piercing the veil between worlds, does he reach for his baby in Annie’s arms, hold her, and finally smile. Freedom—the kind that lasts—might only be found in heaven.
For a film that undermines the white man’s religion so thoroughly throughout its runtime, it seems a devastatingly Christian ending, and perhaps a foregone conclusion. Maybe, for Black folks on earth, the death that brings eternal life is still our only way out of all this.
But in choosing as the final representation of freedom Sammie’s memory of riding in the backseat of the car with his big cousins on the morning of the last best day of his life, cotton fields to the left and right, and a long stretch of road and unending possibility before them, Coogler offers a bit of hope. It’s those hours before the heist, assembling your team, surrounded by our past, and traveling in community towards freedom—even if we fail, even if it won’t last—that’s always worth the struggle.
Stay watchin’,
Brooke
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I've been obsessed with Sinners and down the rabbit hole since viewing, this is the best review and breakdown I've read. So insightful and thought-provoking. Thanks for sharing your passion and gifts!