The son of a preacher sets aside his father’s Bible and picks up a guitar to help his gangster cousins open a makeshift nightclub in the Jim Crow South. But when a handful of vampires show up, the evening takes a bloody turn. Well-crafted and featuring a dynamite soundtrack, Sinners is nevertheless incredibly bloody, surprisingly sexual and regularly profane. But its biggest issue might be how it deals with Christianity.
His name’s Sammie, but most folks just call him Preacher Boy. And while he likes God just fine, his real love’s the blues.
The blues? You might say. Why, Preacher Boy’s barely old enough to shave. What does he know about the blues?
In a way, he knows plenty. Sharecropping in the Mississippi delta in 1932 isn’t a life to which most aspire. Sammie picks cotton, and he lives a lot like his great-grandfather might’ve—even though one was a slave and the other calls himself free.
But that’s hardly unusual in this corner of the South. That sort of pain is universal. But the blues, some might say, spring from a lifetime of hurt. Preacher Boy? He’s not lived long enough to feel the whole weight of life. His wife hasn’t run off (since he’s not married). No one’s stolen his truck (since he doesn’t own one).
And to hear him sing, you might wonder if he missed the point entirely: For Sammie, the blues speaks to joy: The joy he feels when playing, the joy people feel while listening.
And tonight, Sammie hopes, will be the most joyful night of his life.
His cousins, known as Smoke and Stack, made a (perhaps literal) killing as Chicago gangsters. But they’re back home now, planning to open their own juke joint filled with good food, loads of liquor and plenty of great music. They’ve invited Sammie to play.
And play he will. Even if his preacher dad doesn’t like it. Even if some white folk might try to stop it.
Why, he’d play even if the devil himself showed up.
And turns out, he just might.
OK, so Satan doesn’t make an appearance here, even if some characters refer to the movie’s main antagonist as “the devil.” But a smattering of vampires do stop by for a visit—attracted, it would seem, by Sammie’s music.
That leads to a great deal of chaos. But it opens the door to moments of heroism, too. One character sacrifices himself for his friends. Another drives a stake into someone else’s heart before she can turn. (She requested as much before the battle began.) One woman—knowing that the vampires might well head into town and kill everyone there, including the her own teen daughter—invites some bloodsuckers in, preferring to engage them in battle.
We learn that Stack broke off a relationship with a mixed-race, white-looking woman for the woman’s own safety. (Many inhabitants in that corner of the 1930s South would’ve killed them both otherwise.)
The movie actually begins where it ends—with a bloodied, horrified Sammie, still clutching the broken neck of his guitar, staggering into his father’s church on Sunday morning. He interrupts a children’s choir singing “This Little Light of Mine,” and his father welcomes him in and embraces him. But the pastor also tells Sammie to turn his back on his music (and all its sinful trappings) and recommit his life to Christ.
That’s one of the major points of tension in Sinners—the very name of which the movie begs us to question. And in some ways, the film offers Christianity as a secondary antagonist.
Someone tells Sammie that Christianity itself was forced on Blacks in the United States (standing in sharp contrast to the blues, which was created by them). Later, we hear another spin on that same trope, with an Irishman complaining that his own people had Christianity foisted upon them, too (while admitting that the Lord’s Prayer still gives him comfort). And while Sammie’s preacher father is a decent enough man, Sinners paints him as a bit cold and clueless.
But the pastor does set the table for what’s to come in a deeply spiritual way: “You keep dancing with the devil,” he tells his son, “and one day it’s gonna follow you home.”
Christianity is largely ineffective against the vampires here, too. They recite the Lord’s Prayer without fear, and no one brandishes any crosses to keep them away (though one character does wear a cross necklace). But that statement comes with a couple of caveats: “Holy water” is referenced as an effective vampire deterrent. And one Native American (Choctaw) vampire hunter sincerely tells a couple, “May God … be with you.”
Annie, Smoke’s onetime wife and/or partner, practices a sort of magic that includes herbs and divination and the like. Long ago, she gave Smoke a “mojo” bag to protect him, and she tells Smoke that it seems to have worked. “So why didn’t it work on our little baby, then?” Smoke asks her.
Smoke doesn’t place much faith in Annie’s sort of magic, either. He believes in “no demons, no ghosts, no magic,” he tells her. “Just power.” And only money can give someone power.
But Sinners suggests that the world does hold magic—that of music. An opening narrative tells us about how African lore tells of musicians who could “conjure spirits” and bridge time. But it adds that music can also attract evil. And Sammie’s music, the movie suggests, is responsible for attracting this particularly vampiric sort of evil to their doorstep.
We see a cross on a church wall and hear references to church, piety and faith. There’s a reference to 1 Corinthians 10:13. Sonny sings about how his father gave him a Bible when Sonny was 8 years old. Characters allude to “the other side,” and the people waiting there. And one scene seems to confirm a gentle, healing afterlife. When someone tells Stack to “rot in h—,” Stack responds, “I will.”
While the film doesn’t include any explicit nudity, it does feature several extremely provocative and intimate scenes. In one, a woman grabs a man very suggestively, and the two kiss passionately before they engage in intimacies in a storefront. Another involves oral sex (and the woman in the scene, we should note, is married to someone else). A third explicit encounter belongs in the section below. Sexual sounds and movements are present in all three.
Dancers at the juke joint dance lithely, passionately and suggestively with one another. One performer crawls across the stage with a sultry, animalistic abandon.
We also hear some incredibly frank and lewd conversations that reference sexual acts or desire. For instance, Stack graphically tells Sonny how to best perform oral sex on someone. A woman talks about a tawdry sexual encounter she had (also involving oral sex).
Another curious note: Sinners flirts with the idea of underage sex at times without ever definitively crossing the line. Mary—Stack’s one-time lover—talks about how Stack left her in the lurch and how she waited for him to come back. “I’m grown now, Stack,” and she now believes that Stack was just using her for sex. When Sonny flirts with a woman, he tries to tell her that, “I’m not that young,” without ever specifying his age. A song references a resisted attraction to a 15-year-old.
Sinners is a strong example of escalating tension. At first, the gradually escalating narrative features just brief moments of wince-worthy violence—like the pop of a stray firecracker on a spring evening. But then as the film nears its conclusion, it feels like the Fourth of July.
A couple of characters are shot on the main street of Clarksville, Mississippi. One gets pegged in the rear. Another, much more grotesquely, suffers a bullet wound to his knee. (He screams in pain and is dragged off to the side.) A vampire attacks a victim; while the attack itself takes place off camera, we see the attacker with blood covering his face and neck while the victim, for the moment, lies prone.
One scene blends sex and violence together: Two former lovers rekindle their intimacies, with one secretly being a vampire. A couple of people walk in on the couple, engaged—it would seem—in sex. But when the interlopers get a closer look, they see that one is basically eating the other, the throat of the victim gushing blood and the mouth, neck and chest of the attacker coated in crimson.
It’s not the only living snack the vampires chow down on before the über-bloody night hits its crescendo. And one guy is attacked and gnawed on by several vampires at once.
Bullets don’t stop vampires (of course), but that doesn’t stop humans from using guns when they can. One guy fills a vampire with lead—but it only stops the beast momentarily. Another vampire has part of his head blown off (a wound that we see throughout much of the rest of the movie).
The battle-like finale involves tons of guns, knives, stakes and teeth. People are bitten and partly devoured, all with ludicrous levels of blood. Vamps are shot, skewered and immolated. One such bloodsucker goes up in a spectacular fire, flames curling up to the sky.
We see plenty of human-on-human violence as well. Several people, perhaps a dozen or more, are gunned down. A couple of them fall victim to a thrown grenade.
Claws rake across someone’s face, leaving lifelong scars. A character seemingly falls to earth, suffering a ton of smoldering scars. Someone gets pushed into a pool of water repeatedly (echoing, it would seem, a sort of unholy baptism). Another person is shot in the gut, and blood seeps out of the wound. A rattlesnake is stabbed in the neck, slowly dying from a grotesque injury.
We hear about 25 f-words and a similar number of s-words. Also on tap:“a–,” “b–ch,” “d–n,” “h—,” “p-ss” and “p—y.” Characters use the n-word about a dozen times, as well. “God’s name is misused about 10 times (most of which also include “d–n”), and Jesus’ name is abused once.
The story takes place during Prohibition, when alcohol was technically outlawed across the country. But that doesn’t seem to hold anyone back here.
One musician, a man named Slim, drinks a lot. He takes swigs from an ever-present flask. And he originally turns down the gig at Smoke and Stack’s juke joint because of a previous engagement—one that pays him enough to buy all the corn whiskey he wants. He changes his mind when Stack offers him a real bottle of Irish beer: He drinks a sip, and Stack tells him that he can have all the beer he wants while he’s playing.
Plenty of people drink, presumably to excess, during the night at the juke joint. Someone tells a customer that they have everything from corn whiskey to Irish beer to Italian wine.
Several characters smoke (including Smoke).
Taking place as it does in the Jim Crow South, racism is a huge theme in Sinners.
Most overtly, you’ve got the KKK. When Smoke and Stack buy the old mill that serves as their juke joint, they buy it from an obviously racist seller, and their negotiations contain references to the Ku Klux Klan. (The seller tells the SmokeStack twins that the KKK no longer exists in this corner of Mississippi—an obvious lie that just grows more obvious as the story unfolds.) Two of a vampire’s victims are also in league with the Klan, judging from the outfit spotted inside their house.
The town of Clarksdale itself is obviously segregated, as are nearby communities. We see signs designating “Whites Only” or “Blacks Only” areas. Most tellingly, Clarksdale has two grocery stores—one for Black customers, the other for white ones—that stand across the street from each other. And both are owned by the same family.
That racial tension runs both ways. When a three white folks show up at Smoke and Stack’s juke joint, asking to be let in, they’re turned away: Smoke worries that if someone accidentally stepped on their toes or spilled a drink on them, there’d be no end to the trouble.
This racial vibe takes on a particularly interesting sheen in the context of this vampiric story. The vamps are, initially, all white. And they try to lure their victims with the promise of true freedom and equality. Do they mean it? Maybe in their own way, they do: The movie’s vampire collective takes on a much more multiethnic tang as the movie goes on, and they do have a certain strictly defined sense of freedom, in that they live as they want and kill whom they’d like. And we learn that these Caucasian vampires were subjected, while alive, to other forms of prejudice and discrimination.
Another note to illustrate Sinners’ racial complexity: Sammie plays a guitar that allegedly was played by Charley Patton—a man most historians believe was of Black, white and Choctaw heritage. All three lineages make an appearance here.
A man urinates outside the juke joint. After experiencing a moment of fear, Slim confesses that he might’ve defecated in his pants. He also nearly vomits a piece of garlic (when he and others are forced to swallow them to prove their humanity).
Music serves as a huge and powerful element in Sinners. From foot-pounding blues numbers to gorgeous Irish ballads, the film leans into melody in incredibly effective ways. In one jaw-dropping scene, Sammie’s music seems to call up music makers from across time and around the globe, all of whom participate in a musical mashup that threatens to pull moviegoers off their feet.
But one of the most telling bits of music comes in the form of a simple, very familiar gospel tune: “This Little Light of Mine.”
The song bookends the film, forming the first and last words we hear. In the beginning, it comes from a church, sung by a handful of children dressed in white. And then in a post-credits scene, we see Sammie, Preacher Boy, belt out his own version, sitting in the same church.
But given everything that we’ve seen in Sinners, the latter rendition of “This Little Light of Mine” comes with a far different context.
The “light” of the song typically refers to our faith. That faith lights up our lives. We share it with others and, thus, brighten the world.
But for Sammie, the “light” is not God, but the blues. His love of the blues. His talent for singing and playing the blues. It is, in a way, a hymn to music … and to himself.
Sinners has scored some rave reviews, and for good reason. Ryan Coogler, the director behind Creed and Black Panther, knows how to make a dynamite film. But in Sinners, he leans into the vibe not of his most famous heroes (T’Challa from Black Panther and, of course, Apollo Creed from Creed), but of his powerful and embittered villains (Erik Killmonger in Black Panther and Damian Anderson from Creed III). Sinners is more about retribution than redemption. It’s less about sacrificing for the greater good and more about serving the god of self.
I appreciated this film’s ambitions. In a lot of ways, I appreciated its execution. But while the road that Sinners sets us on comes with some compelling sights and memorable sounds, the road itself is rocky: so much sex, so much violence, so much profanity. And its ultimate destination? That God is just fine if put in His place, but the music of self should drive us? As satisfying as that may feel to some, it’s a dead end. Christianity has always been a creation of other people, beginning with its literally otherworldly Creator. But if it’s true, it’s true for all.
And all we real-world sinners need it.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
