Coogler’s conflicted creativity: A Sinners analysis

Sinners is a blockbuster, action-musical hybrid that has instantly gained mainstream attention and ‘best of 2025’ projections. Its accessibility has made it a smash-hit at the box office, but its success doesn’t necessarily translate to an active viewership, eager to take the kind of intellectual position that the writer-director, Ryan Coogler, has taken for granted. Reading the film through a nuanced, postcolonial lens – relating vampires to black tradition and culture – seems like a unanimously good thing, serving the film’s artistic merit. But do Coogler’s treatments of post-colonial themes transcend his maelstrom of spectacle?

I was disappointed on my first couple of watches, but that feeling has dissipated as I am forced to work with what is there rather than grieve what could be. I had a feeling that the hyperbolically positive responses to the film were misleading – as if the film was the best thing since sliced bread. Of course, the film’s economic success is commendable, financing original stories in a time of Marvel adaptations and Disney remakes. It demonstrates to Hollywood the market value of young and passionate creators – even if Coogler’s thematic ambitions became an entanglement of rich ideas that only frustrated me as a viewer expecting more. Equally spectacle-heavy films from this year, like Death of a Unicorn and A Minecraft Movie, are gleefully ridiculed and reduced to simplified, crowd-pleasing blockbusters with basic messaging. This hypocrisy with cinematic audiences is confusing. The praise afforded to Sinners, which has its own cringe to contend with, is inconsistent when criticising these films which are full of colourfully packaged jabs at capitalist, pharmaceutical exploitation or fascist-coded artistic and cultural repression. These films prompt some seriously interesting ideas, just like Sinners, so why discriminate against some for faults also found in another?

Just because you dress Marvel humour with sex and swearing doesn’t make the humour less… Marvel

For example, Sinner’s engagement with postcolonial realities and black American history, for the first 40 minutes of the film, feels like an adequate adaptation for a Hollywood production, before settling into the barn-turned-juke-joint for the rest of its runtime. At this point, it is forced to depend on its characters, who are written with a silliness that makes them unattractive or generally develops apathy for the film – even in the face of the vampiric threat. Just because you dress Marvel humour with sex and swearing doesn’t make the humour less… Marvel.

However, aside from the characters, Sinners’ most central setting – the barn – provides some complexity to bite into. A sawmill owned by the KKK becomes converted by the Smoke and Stack twins (both played by Michael B. Jordan) into a space for black expression of cultural heritage. The barn offers black sharecroppers a reprieve from their harsh plantation work. It is a space where they can use their hard-earned, wooden tokens to party and ‘sin’. The black partygoers are unaware of the barn’s hidden purpose as the stage for a white supremacist plot to massacre the minority population of the Mississippi. The freedom of the barn is an illusion, reversed and imposed upon by a vampiric violence that promotes racial segregation and cleansing.

The reality of white America’s construction is engulfed in an abject darkness – a breeding ground for the horror genre’s vampiric violence

A tense and charged setting, the barn reflects a history of spatial separation. To make an allegorical reading, “club juke” is an adaptation of the infamous black ghetto – neighbourhoods set up to be exploited with social and political glass ceilings. In Nancy Denton and Douglas Massey’s book, American Apartheid, they reflect on America’s construction of an underclass redlined from the suburbs by substance abuse and deprivation. Sinners comments on this modern history by establishing the 1930s “juke joint”, even if it is established at the detriment of the interesting settings in the first 40 minutes of the film. This black owned, organised and administered hedonism is a welcome substitute for the violence and corruption of federal campaigns enacted by white America and its disregard for the black citizen. However, outside the barn, the reality of white America’s construction is engulfed in an abject darkness – a breeding ground for the horror genre’s vampiric violence – in contrast with the soulful blues inside.

Jack O’Connel’s Irish vampire, Remmick, serves as the film’s Machiavellian antagonist and is pivotal for understanding the post-colonial reading of Sinners. Vampires are inherently political devices. The most famous vampire, Dracula, was conceived by an Irish author to allegorically depict the British colonisation of Ireland. Dracula’s author, Bram Stoker, reverses the roles, with Dracula embodying the oppression faced by the Irish people, to threaten the British coloniser. From interviews, it is clear Coogler held his vampiric influences on his sleeve.

When Remmick is introduced, he converts two Klan members into vampires, stripping them of their bigotry. Remmick destroys their free will to be racist, as they assimilate with his values, beliefs and philosophy. Despite his first conversion being dressed in blood and screams that terrify the audience, the real terror comes through Remmick’s ability to impress his beliefs upon his victims, based on his disingenuous, utilitarian ambition of racial cohesion. It is interesting to analyse whether Remmick’s actions of reforming racism through a violent suppression of free will are ethical? Unfortunately, Coogler moves on from the scene before this idea can be explored.

Coogler boxes his film in with the vampire as the necessary antagonist of his narrative, forced to tattoo vampiric rules and regulations into the film

Coogler boxes his film in with the vampire as the necessary antagonist of his narrative, forced to tattoo vampiric rules and regulations into the film. These tropes produce eye-rolling results, such as the let-me-in scene with the character Cornbread – a moment especially corny due to its lack of subtlety.

A possible reasoning for the inclusion of this silly rule is that Sinners’ vampires, who are embodied by the colonised subject, subconsciously cannot force their way in to colonise the barn. Remmick recognises the harm and violence that an invasive act like this causes, due to his Irish heritage. However, post-colonial arguments cannot be intuitively drawn in this article for other gimmicky vampiric deterrents like garlic, wooden stakes, and silver. Although Remmick wishes to invade the barn of blues to create community, he really just desires preacher boy Sammie’s gifts as a modern-day griot to contact his ancestors. Coogler should be criticised for his simplification of the griot role, that only a Hollywood production could misappropriate, as the character of Annie (a spiritual exposition device) narrates the film’s opening by mispronouncing them as “gree-ots” and not “gree-oh”.

Alas, I digress. Coogler embeds Remmick with a possibly thoughtful adaptation of the imperial boomerang, as he colonises the barn through manipulation. Remmick converts Stack’s biracial lover, Mary (played by Hailee Steinfield), as she attempts to gain material concessions to help the juke on its opening night. Coogler explores how Mary’s intentions to exploit her white privilege for Stack make her susceptible to vampirism, symbolising the ambivalent contradiction of white supremacy, channelled through the colonising Irish vampire. Mary’s vampiric violence is a disturbing white supremacist alignment, as she kills and corrupts the owner of the black establishment and ends the cultural celebration. This terror causes the black partygoers to flee into the arms of Remmick’s bloodlust.

Remmick believes the undead, vampiric existence would be better for the African-American population, whom Afropessimist scholars like Orlando Patterson believe are already socially dead in the eyes of white America. Remmick is ignorant to his own colonial mimicry, and demonstrates how colonial attitudes are like a malevolent energy, existing within a cycle of parasitical, ideological oppression.

He disguises the vampiric condition with a utopian illusion of community, which in reality robs the African-American of their individuality, condemning their soul to a cultural and ancestral alienation

Sinners’ vampires are no longer aggressive embodiments against oppression, as Stoker may have intended, but are oppressive forces in themselves. Coogler discusses this complexity in an interview by suggesting that white supremacist violence against black people is inevitable: Smoke survives undead vampires to die to a racist bullet. Remmick’s vampirism exists as a white saviour fallacy addressing that issue. He disguises the vampiric condition with a utopian illusion of community, which in reality robs the African-American of their individuality, condemning their soul to a cultural and ancestral alienation. A state of existence that Stack reflects upon in the post-credits, as he tells an older Sammie – still scarred mentally and physically from the horrors of that night – how vampirism robbed him of the sun and forces him to exist in perpetual darkness, unable to co-exist with his brother again.

Sinners is a pot of bubbling ideas, but perhaps too many flavours spoil the broth. Its ambition to incorporate everything is unfocused and knocks the wind out of its own sails. I could Stack all of its flaws and analyse its potential until I am red in the face, but I refuse to inhale the Smoke of a film that makes me feel so blue. Coogler made the best film that he could make, but his IMAX work isn’t like Nolan’s, his screenwriting and editing can feel amateurish, and he should be thankful to Ludwig Göransson for the film’s atmosphere. Most importantly, he shouldn’t be scared to test his audience; instead of treating us to flashbacks that tell us what to think or what a character could be feeling, he needs to take his ambition for genre and apply it to the ideas that his film generates, and to take those ideas more cinematically seriously.