If there’s a word to describe the word-of-mouth vampire hit Sinners, it’s probably “carnal”—and all that that implies. Spoilers ahead, so let the first one be that writer-director Ryan Coogler does not shy away from depicting sin. As a movie, it does what it says on the poster.
But having seen the movie twice now, both times in packed weeknight theaters, I can attest that this is no mere gory slasher flick. It has aims beyond shocking the viewer with sex and violence. Sinners is a genre-bender, at first a historical drama before it fully leans into horror and suspense in the second act. It is also a musical. Many reviews and articles focus on what the film appears to say about race, power, and culture. But Coogler also employs overtly Christian imagery as he explores the relationship between skin color and culture, inviting the viewer to meditate on good and evil, the meaning of the Incarnation, and the promise of the Resurrection.
Sinners is set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932. It follows the identical twins Smoke and Stack (the so-called “Smokestack Twins” are in fact one actor, the magnetic Michael B. Jordan). Local boys who have made good working for Al Capone in Chicago, they have returned home to purchase an old sawmill they plan to turn into a nightclub. It will be a safe space intended only for the black sharecropping community in which they grew up. The morning of the grand opening, they pick up their cousin Sammie, a preacher’s son, and we accompany the three over the course of a single day and night. We’re along for the ride as they recruit family, friends, and lovers for their ambitious enterprise.
In addition to the lure of Italian wine and Irish beer (pilfered from those respective ethnic mobs back in Chicago), the brothers have another ace up their sleeve. Sammie is literally a supernaturally gifted blues guitarist and vocalist. When he plays, his music transcends time and space to create a mystical, intergenerational communion between past, present, and future.
“I AM,” he tells them, “your way out.”
When the movie finally unleashes Sammie’s musical gift, we see that this isn’t just a metaphor for the timelessness of music. The breathtaking musical number begins as a blues performance. “I lied to you,” he croons. The lyrics are about how he’s misled his father about his religious faith, and he prefers to go his own way in the world. The song builds to a time-spanning crescendo. A future rocker materializes to play his electric guitar alongside Sammie’s acoustic one. They are soon joined by DJs at turntables and traditional African and eventually Chinese dancers. The time-travelers go unseen by Sammie’s appreciative audience, but their presence is clearly felt in the smiles and dancing that permeate the space while he performs. It is an attractive scene that also proves irresistible to the film’s villain, an Irish vampire named Remmick.
Sammie knows he’s putting himself in spiritual danger when he hops in the car that morning with his glamorous, dangerous older cousins. His father warns him against joining the “drunks and philanderers” that night (he’s not wrong), adding that it’s an invitation for the devil to prey on him (it turns out he’s not wrong there, either).
Despite its instant popularity, the twins’ juke joint is damned almost any way you look at it. For one thing, although the Klan is officially gone, it has only been driven underground, and it knows all about the nightclub. For another, most of the twins’ clientele can only pay in scrip, literal wooden nickels unredeemable anywhere but plantation stores. There is another wrinkle. Stack’s love interest predicts that it’s only a matter of time before the Irish and Italian mobs figure out the brothers have skipped town with their merchandise and come looking for them. Finally, and more immediately, there are the vampires waiting outside.
Remmick immediately recognizes in Sammie’s musical ability the chance to connect with his own people again. We don’t know how long Remmick has been a vampire, but when we first encounter him, he is alone and seeking to make more companions for himself. If he can claim Sammie, he can also claim Sammie’s musical gift for connection. He need never be alone again.
Sinners borrows from the standard vampire mythos. To be a vampire is to be condemned to an eternity in exile. As they wander the world, they must beg at doors to be let in. As everyone knows, vampires cannot cross a threshold without an invitation. But the movie also adds its own spin on traditional vampire lore: Remmick can evidently read people’s thoughts. Once he makes someone a vampire, they are plugged into a communal vampire hive mind that shares knowledge and memories.
The vampires in Sinners use an array of tactics to try to (sometimes actually) seduce their prey. Remmick is different from Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, a vampire who describes himself as pure appetite. Rather, Remmick and his followers offer their prospective victims a utopian pitch. As one vampire says, joining their undead collective promises to bring about “heaven right here on earth.” Remmick insists to the besieged human remnant inside the sawmill that if they subordinate their individual wills to his, humanity’s fallen state is fixable.
“I AM,” he tells them, “your way out.” Remmick and his vampire coven are an Antichrist, holding out an illusion of equality and harmony to sinners that ultimately flattens and destroys their humanity. Remmick dunks Sammie in water three times as he prepares to bite and finally possess him. This is a clear mockery of a baptism, an inversion of the death to self to which the Christian is called through life in Christ. Although it promises connection and unity, Remmick’s vampiric resurrection tethers the victim to this world. It is not part of any eschatology and offers no ultimate hope for an afterlife.
After a climactic overnight confrontation with the vampires, a brilliant sunrise finally defeats Remmick and his horde. Sammie and Smoke are the last two human survivors. Later, in the first of two post-credit sequences, we will learn that even though Stack was bitten and turned into a vampire early on, Smoke ultimately refused to kill his twin. Instead, Smoke extracts a promise from Stack never to go after Sammie and lets his brother go.
Their undead foe vanquished and their friends and family gone forever, Smoke bids his younger cousin goodbye and urges him to put everything behind him.
This isn’t the end, though. In the film’s coda, a group of Klansmen arrive to destroy the nightclub and anyone inside, this having been their plan all along. From a hiding spot in the woods, Smoke is waiting for them with a machine gun. He mows down all the men but their leader, the Grand Dragon. Mortally wounded in the fight, Smoke sees in his dying moments his dead wife, Annie, holding the baby they lost years ago.
He is still smoking the cigarette he lit earlier to steel his nerves, and Annie will not let him hold his baby until he puts it out. She does not, she says, want “that smoke on him.” Just then, Smoke hears the Grand Dragon offer him money to spare his life. Without a word, Smoke turns his gun on the Grand Dragon and finishes him off. He then turns back to Annie, and she hands him his child.
This doesn’t seem like the kind of redemptive act that should get an antihero into heaven. But like nearly everything in Sinners, there seem to be layers upon layers to this scene. I’ll offer one interpretation.
Remmick and his vampires claimed they were collapsing society’s divisions and creating a utopia in the here and now. In reality, they were offering a monotonous dead end.
Picking off the Grand Dragon is perhaps not dissimilar to Old Testament stories that describe the Hebrews completely annihilating their enemies in battle. These accounts seem brutal and unnecessarily vindictive to modern sensibilities, but biblical scholar Jeff Cavins explains that these difficult war stories are at least partly allegorical. Enemies like the Canaanites embody sin and worldly attachments. When God’s people wipe them out, it is a graphic illustration of the need to completely eradicate the things that keep the soul from unity with God.
We have just seen Smoke fight desperately to eradicate the incarnate evil of Remmick and his followers. Dispatching the Klan members and then their leader as they prowl outside his erstwhile nightclub is a parallel eradication of senseless and horrifying evil. When in his final moments Smoke definitively rejects an offer of money, he is repudiating the one thing he sought after most of his life.
Smoke’s earlier decision not to kill Stack supports this view. Vulture editor Genevieve Koski observed on The Next Picture Show podcast that when Smoke declines to kill his identical twin, he is actually refusing to kill a part of himself. The audience knows on a meta level that in reality, Smoke and Stack are the same person. With that in mind, Smoke’s refusal to kill his brother is more than a misguided protective instinct toward someone he loves. He knows that killing Stack in his vampiric state would free him from an eternity condemned to earth, and he has no issue earlier driving a wooden stake through Stack’s ex-girlfriend Mary after a vampire attacks her. By sparing him, Smoke indicates that he is not ready to die to the part of himself that Stack embodies—the ego that clings to and pursues worldly attachments.
At almost the same time, the movie shows us that after leaving the carnage at the sawmill, Sammie returns to his father’s church during the Sunday morning service. Sinners then derives some tension from whether Sammie will follow his father’s entreaties to drop his guitar and forswear music.
We learn during the credits that he does not; Sammie lives to be an old man with a long, successful blues career. But the second post-credits sequence also shows us something else: a flashback to young Sammie sitting alone in his father’s church playing a blues rendition of “This Little Light of Mine.” Although he insisted in his debut number at the juke joint that he lied to his father about loving the blues more than his Christian faith, this flashback suggests that maybe Sammie was also lying a little to the audience and himself. His hymn doesn’t sound like the staid, traditional version. Instead, he’s made it uniquely his own, and his joy is clear as he sings this promise to let his light shine.
“The glory of God is man fully alive,” according to St. Irenaeus, who was arguing against the Gnostic heresy that denied Christ’s human nature. But to paraphrase another saint, St. Catherine of Siena, if Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection have sanctified the human condition, then to be whom God made us to be is to set the world on fire.
When Stack the vampire shows up to visit Sammie in the first post-credits sequence, which takes place sixty years after the film’s events, he says he remembers the day leading up to that fateful night as the best of his life. It was the last time he saw his brother, he tells Sammie, and the last time he saw the sun. Remmick and his vampires claimed they were collapsing society’s divisions and creating a utopia in the here and now. In reality, they were offering a monotonous dead end. In erasing the distinctions between individuals, the vampires seemed to offer freedom from the hatreds and suffering of this world. But Stack isn’t really free. He isn’t fully alive.
This Easter season, Catholics contemplate how Christ’s Resurrection has elevated our humanity and bestowed on us the promise of eternal life. The ersatz undying that Remmick offers Sammie is a collectivist utopian present that isolates, obscures, and finally obliterates the human person. But real freedom exalts us.
Sinners is a movie that invites the viewer to think deeply about identity. “We are all sinners,” the tagline reminds us. In the end, however, the movie extends the possibility that “sinner” is one identity that need not define us forever.