Dimly-lit spaces full of Southern blues and culture embody the atmosphere of the South, symbolizing the emotional state that music brings and unites the importance of cultural power. This is what it comes to mind about the movie “Sinners.”
The film begins with a time-lapse from the 1930s and an event that happens later and throughout the movie, where a boy named Sammie who has a passion for music is walking back to his father’s church with his guitar broken in half.
Later, Sammie decides to go run along with his twin cousins Smoke and Stack to help plan and set up for a juke joint party. At the party, uninvited vampires ask to be welcomed in but Stack declines. Still, one of the party guests got bitten by the vampires.
Sammie realizes that his music is what lured the vampires to his location, because the vampires want to take his talent for themselves and to make Sammie one of them, making the entire group more powerful.
Near the end, there is a brawl between the humans and vampires. Most of the guests’ souls got consumed by the vampires, involving when one of the twins went into a spiral after getting bitten. I wasn’t expecting for more than one main character to be the last one standing and staying human, but there were two that survived.
The movie showed the importance of the blues and music inherited from generation to generation and how it brings Black communities together, especially in bringing Black generational music to life and finding how it helped Black people express themselves even in oppressed settings at the time.
I also think it’s unique that director Ryan Coogler merged fantasy and horror in order to portray how African Americans expressed themselves in segregated and oppressed systems. The director also included a rotational timeline of each music genre that African Americans have been in and shown a big attribution to. Whether they had their work and ideas taken advantage of or weren’t given credit for their work or not, the director found a way to portray music as a way to make it a safe space during hard times.
As for the creation of the movie, I know that it took more than one or two years for production and film making of the movie. And that it took a lot of work for one actor (Micheal B. Jordan) to play two people at the same time. I think that it’s interesting how he was able to play two characters at the same time while having the two characters keep a sibling-like demeanor and dynamic between the two of them throughout the movie.
I had recognized Hailee Steinfield from voice-acting a character on an animated series called Arcane. I’d say that “Sinners” is different from that because “Arcane” took place on a more hyper-fantasy level than “Sinners,” which had more of a historical background.
I think the director wants us to see what Southern Black culture can look and be perceived as in a horror and fantasy setting while at the same time, looking at how people inherit their culture and music, while they still encounter oppressive systems in the real world. This movie truly represents more than what it shows.
