“What? The land of the free?
Whoever told you that is your enemy.”
— “Know Your Enemy,” Rage Against the Machine
Sinners is a movie about music second, money first.
Interpreting the movie the other way around is understandable, given that it’s half vampire movie, half musical. Sammie’s (Miles Caton) voice, passionate and wise and weighty. Sammie’s guitar, a gift inherited from an evil man. Sammie’s song, so powerful that it tears open the veil between the past and the present and calls to the undead. For Sammie’s family and friends in 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, the blues is their means of expression, bonding, and community, patently and traditionally Black music that speaks to the struggles they’ve faced living in a country that stole and enslaved their ancestors and continues to oppress and antagonize them. At Club Juke—the joint that twin brothers Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan and Michael B. Jordan, respectively) open to entertain the sharecroppers, farmers, and other rural workers of their small town—blues lives alongside ragtime, soul, and R&B. Pianos and guitars and harmonicas and stomping feet blend together, their sound rising high past the rafters to entertain the stars.
But also at Club Juke: money, and concerns about money. Is there ever one without the other? The twins are always calculating, literally and figuratively—how to get people in the door, how much to charge for drinks and food, who to pay and how much. Should they take the plantation currency with which the white land owners pay their Black workers so they can restrict their use of that money to the plantation’s own overpriced stores? How long can they keep Club Juke’s doors open based on the actual cash with which they’re getting paid? What’s fair to their community, and what’s fair to the twins, who are taking on all kinds of risk by opening Club Juke in the first place? An army of white people are after them, some for the Smokestack Twins’ crimes (stealing from both the Irish and Italian mobs in Chicago) and some just because the twins happen to be Black men who are alive (the Ku Klux Klan, the Grand Dragon of whom sells the twins the old sawmill). The twins might not even get the chance to spend the profits they earn. But this is America, and as the American Dream goes, money makes you matter. Money makes you a person. Money can give you an edge against those who hate you, and against a system that’s set up to fuck you over.
Sinners, like so much other media, punctures the bubble of that fantasy by presenting the allure, and the ultimate poison, of that ideology. In Sinners, money kills you. Music might bring you back. But first, you’re going to die.
***
Sinners sets up its internal tension, the music versus the money, in its first few scenes. Wunmi Mosaku’s Annie, who will eventually tell her former lover Smoke that his money “come with blood,” explains the “legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death” that will incite the back half of the film’s action. Sammie, blood-splattered and blood-stained, clutches the neck of his prized guitar, its body and decorative resonator broken apart in the deadly night before. His preacher father Jedidiah (Saul Williams) tells Sammie, within the protection of their pristine painted-white church, to “drop the guitar,” an action that Club Juke survivor Sammie can’t do. The music is his burden and his guilt—and also, maybe, his absolution—and filmmaker Ryan Coogler lingers on Sammie’s hand in closeup as it grips the guitar’s broken remainder. And finally, we meet Smoke and Stack outside the boarded sawmill, handing to owner Hogwood (David Maldonado) a suitcase full of cash.
“Leave those sinnin’ ways where they lie,” Sammie’s father had urged him, but Sinners is compelled by sins (duh), and the two it’s most interested in materialize as music and money. On the one hand, music and money are paths to individual independence and collective pleasure, to enough cash jingling in your pocket for you to grab a drink and a fried fish sandwich and then join your friends and family members on the dance floor, exalting in music that people you love and respect are playing for you onstage. On the other hand, Club Juke also embraces a little lust and a little pride, and together they invite the Devil in. Jedidiah fears that fate for his son—fears it so much that he doesn’t even seem surprised when Sammie walks into church during his sermon, already traumatized and haunted enough to last a lifetime. Little does Jedediah know this country already belongs to the Devil, and everyone’s just trying to reach their hands into Old Nick’s pocket before he gets into theirs.
When the film begins with Smoke and Stack’s return home to Mississippi from Chicago, they’re two twins who have ripped off two ethnic-white gangs. They finish each others’ sentences—like when they describe themselves as “grown men, with grown men money … and grown men bullets”—and they’re central to the film’s preoccupation with doubles, duos, and pairs. They tell Sammie two different stories about the provenance of his guitar; to help open Club Juke, they recruit the married couple Bo Chow (Yao) and Grace Chow (Li Jun Li), who run two different grocery stores in segregated Clarksdale. When vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) shows up at the Juke, it’s with two former KKK members in tow, and two gold coins to offer. When Remmick infiltrates the building, it’s through Stack and Mary, two lovers. One person, one musical note, and one dollar bill is lonely; two people are protection, two notes are the beginning of a melody, and two dollar bills are proof that at least you’ve got more than someone with less. Sinners is a movie about all kinds of dualities, but what nearly all of them boil down to is that most of us aren’t acting out of greed. We know there’s strength in numbers, and we know we’re in a system set up to fail us, and we’re acting out of a desire to hold onto what we’ve already got, to avoid reverting to the loneliness of one. And the people who know how to manipulate all those anxieties to their benefit? They’ll eat you alive.
***
Before everything goes to shit, Club Juke’s opening night is a success. Coogler and his collaborators choreograph and score one of the best scenes of the year as Sammie’s “I Lied to You” burns away the boundaries between worlds and unites ancestors and future figures connected to the revelers. In the nightclub converge spirits representing African cultures from all over the continent and the Beijing opera tradition from China; breakdancers, C-walkers, twerkers, and ballerinas; a DJ with turntables and a Bootsy Collins-esque guitarist. They’re all bound together by the magic Sammie is creating with his playing and his voice—as Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) told him before the night began, “With this here ritual, we heal our people, and we be free.”
Nothing shines as brightly as freedom, and Sammie’s song is really a communion, a mutual elemental exchange, an existential chasm opened up with wide arms. It’s no wonder that this spectacle of sentiment catches Remmick’s eye in the night. With a banjo strapped to his back and the KKK members he’d already feasted upon as newly Irish-accented bandmates by his side, Remmick was ready to perform for whomever’s path he crossed. Here, though, is an opportunity for that yearned-for more: If Sammie’s voice can negate time, then maybe Sammie can bring more of Remmick’s people back, more of the Irish who were colonized by the English and strong-armed into their language and their Christianity. More spirits that Remmick recognizes as similar to his own to inhabit these bodies, more people with whom he can sing these lilting and plaintive old songs, more community to help him hold onto the snatches of memory of his past life. All it would take is a little flash of gold. It’s worked well so far, and it will continue to.
Admittedly, Sinners’s supernatural lore is a little fuzzy here. Annie says of vampires that “the soul gets stuck in the body, can’t rejoin the ancestors. Cursed to live here with all this hate,” and that the best thing to do is kill them and free their spirits from the prison of the body. Her suggestion is that the vampire is one entity and the human spirit is another (this is, as real ones know, Buffy the Vampire Slayer logic), and so everyone we meet after the change isn’t really themselves. Vampire-Mary kills Stack; vampire-Cornbread tries to kill Smoke; vampire-Bo lets Remmick threaten his wife Grace and their daughter Lisa (Helena Hu). (Plus, you know, all the vampires are now getting down with Irish songs and mobbing Remmick after he performs for them.) But how to reconcile that with vampire-Mary’s dismay at Annie being killed, or vampire-Stack leaving Smoke unturned, or how much vampire-Mary and vampire-Stack are like their old selves (confident, in love, adoring of Sammie) in the film’s post-credits sequence? Maybe Annie’s knowledge isn’t entirely accurate; maybe Mary and Stack’s love for each other, denied for years, is actually so strong that it can break through whatever impact Remmick had on them once he’s killed.
Arguably, though, how the vampires work isn’t nearly as important as why they work, which is to say, that they’re less interesting in Sinners as villains than they are as representations of what persuasion and coercion look like, what nightmarish things we’ll accept being part of if the tradeoff is that we’re being given the freedom to do what we want. The vampires in Remmick’s gang preach unity to the humans they want to turn, but on some level they’re also offering unencumbered individuality, a mode of red-of-tooth-and-claw survivalism that is as ruthless as capitalism itself.
Because, before Club Juke’s opening night is a success, there are all kinds of conversations about money that take place, that present it as something the Smokestack Twins know they need to survive but also that they see as a means of empowerment. Limited empowerment, to be sure—the twins know the KKK won’t stop hating them just because they took their money, and part of the visceral glee of Smoke’s slaughter of them in the film’s final act is because it’s payback for the Grand Dragon’s double-cross and intended theft—but in a country that equates capital with personhood, empowerment nevertheless. So Smoke encourages a girl to barter with him about how much to charge to watch his truck, telling her to be bolder in her ask. Stack whoops in delight when he hears Sammie sing for the first time, exclaiming “We gon’ make some money.” Delta Slim explains how much his normal Saturday-night gig pays, a fee that Stack scoffs at before he offers more; the Chows take on working at Club Juke that night for extra cash, too. And Mary thinks she’s helping the twins by going out to Remmick and seeing if he and his fellow musicians have “money to spend,” a question that seems innocent up until Remmick drops those two gold coins “from a different place and a different time, but it spends just the same,” into her palm. (Fascinating is how each thinks the other is white, but Irish Remmick and biracial Mary have each in fact had whiteness forced upon them.) “Numbers always gotta be in conversation with each other,” Smoke tells that girl, and his statement links back to the film’s obsession with duos and dualities. But maybe it’s also suggesting a different kind of conversation, one in which this country puts its dispossessed, its underclasses, and its unpeople in harm’s way for enough money to assert themselves. “I Lied to You” is the spark that sets the unnatural fire that eventually takes down Club Juke, but the tinder is the normal, regular, everyday bargains and barters we make to try and accumulate just a little bit more for ourselves and the people we love.
Is the suggestion here, even lightly, that two of the inevitabilities of our capitalist system are the desire to acquire and the ruin that might come along with it? This is, after all, the same system that was built on slavery, encourages imperialism, and always demands bending the knee. There are too many cause-and-effect moments around money in Sinners to ignore, even if the pattern doesn’t quite fit the narrative that was placed on the film after its release, the reveal of Coogler’s unique payment and rights-ownership deal, and the very weird way certain trade magazines tried to downplay the film’s obvious commercial success.
Sinners has specifically been described as a movie about white people co-opting Black art for their own profit, and the film is certainly about that, externalized in Remmick trying to use Sammie’s skills for his own betterment. But I hesitate to see Remmick in the same way as another 2025 vampire, Kevin O’Leary’s boorish and nationalist Milton Rockwell, a man maintaining his millions by selling pens in Japan after his own son was killed in World War II. In Marty Supreme, Rockwell is a ghoul and a goon, a man literally spanking the upstart Marty Mauser (Timothée Chalamet) to remind him of his place. Is Milton more of a figurative, than literal, bloodsucker? Sure. But consider his threat to Marty when the young ping-pong player engineers a match that he’ll win, and that might dampen Rockwell’s plans for entrepreneurial expansion: “I have no interest in trying to control you. But it’s important that you know the stakes here. I was born in 1601. I’m a vampire. I’ve met a lot of Marty Mausers over the centuries. Some of them crossed me. They weren’t straight, they weren’t honest. And those are the ones that are still here.” O’Leary is all slither and bluster, and Marty Supreme retains him in malevolence, using his maybe-real vampirism as a stand-in for white greed.
Sinners, meanwhile, has a deep sympathy for Remmick. He’s of course a baddie, and he’s written as someone who knows how white people see him, knows how to play on their prejudices, and also knows that their perceptions give him a level of privilege almost no one else has. If the roles were reversed, and a group of Black musicians tried to get into a whites-only nightclub, they wouldn’t be walking away, as Remmick and his two allies do. Code-switching seeps throughout Sinners, and Remmick does it too, begging pathetically to the racist couple to let him in and treacly sweet-talking Smoke, Stack, and everyone else at the Club Juke to be allowed inside. Later, though, O’Connell gives Remmick enough tortured interiority that his position as another cog in a larger machine becomes clear. How long since he danced, cheered on by those who recognized what he was doing? How long since he was embraced with acceptance, not pushed away with fear? The look Remmick throws up to the sky as he’s crowded by his new family is blissful, and it’s recognition. And think too how “Rocky Road to Dublin” is a song about a man leaving his home in Ireland to travel to England and try to make a better life for himself, while being harassed along the way (“They asked me was I hired and wages I required/Till I was almost tired of the rocky road to Dublin”). Later on, when Remmick recites the Lord’s Prayer with Sammie, it’s with half-sarcasm, half-affection; if Smoke and Stack making money is their way of dealing with the violence of whiteness, then Remmick’s acknowledgment of Christianity is his own version of dealing with dehumanization.
“Long ago, the man who stole my father’s land forced these words upon us. I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort,” O’Connell says nostalgically, before going on to deliver his own sermon while baptizing Sammie in his own drowning way. “Those men lie to themselves and lied to us,” Remmick insists, and although he eventually dies in a vortex of fire, that line feels like another piece of Sinners’s ideological puzzle falling into place. Everyone here is dispossessed in some way, and everyone here knows the game is rigged.
***
Sirât is a movie about music second, colonialism first.
It would be understandable to interpret the movie the other way around. It opens with a rave in a desert, then follows a journey through the Moroccan desert, over great expenses of sand, rocky outcroppings, and mountain passes, to another rave in another desert. Giant speakers evoke monoliths, then are stacked on each other into pyramids. The electronic score from David Letellier, a.k.a.Kangding Ray, is a menagerie of bone-shaking beats and synths that coil tight and leap forward like a snake attacking prey. For uninterrupted stretches of time all throughout the film, director Óliver Laxe just watches people dance—how they shimmy and shake and punch and kick and writhe and wriggle, their bodies loose and uninhibited in places they think are empty.
The key point there: places they think are empty. Sirât presents itself initially as a story about family, both biological and found. Middle-aged Spaniard Luis (Sergi López) is looking for his missing daughter Mar, who joined this nomadic rave scene and then disappeared; with his tween son Esteban (Bruno Núñez Arjona) and their dog Pipa in tow, he’s been traveling around, showing scenesters pictures of his daughter, and hoping for a lead. (The fact that Luis is searching for his daughter whose name translates to “water” in a desert is a real wink from Laxe.) The group Luis falls in with can’t really help him, but they’re moving deeper into the desert to keep the party going in more remote locations, and maybe Mar could be there. Against their suggestions, Luis decides to follow them. No matter that World War III seems to have broken out, with Moroccan military members forcing the ravers to evacuate the desert, fighter jets screaming overhead, and locals walking with their worldly possessions while Luis (in one car) and the partiers (in their own caravan) drive by. That international despair can’t touch these Europeans. Their problems are not third-world problems, and their solutions are their own.
As the group travels together through uninterrupted expanses of sand and over crumbling mountains, Sirât draws its characters together. Esteban befriends the ravers, intrigued by their distinct looks—mohawks, tattoos, piercings—and their seeming lack of responsibilities. Luis worries that he’ll also lose his son to the scene’s drugs and aimlessness, but he forms an unlikely bond with Jade (Jade Oukid), the group’s deep-set-eyed, de facto leader who begins to warm to this grumpy kook. The two parties work together to help Luis ford a river; they all share food. And when the desert begins picking them off, it feels like something tranquil and promising has been shattered. First the car Esteban and Pipa are in rolls backward off a mountain, sending them both plunging to their deaths, right in front of Luis and everyone else. The group can’t go back down to retrieve the bodies, so they leave them behind. In their grief, the group improvises a rave in the desert with two speakers—and then, as they’re dancing, they start blowing up. The area is littered with hidden land mines that kill Jade and another member of the group. The remaining four, including Luis, realize they need to cross the desert again to reach safety. They lose their van, and another member of their party. Finally, only Luis and two of the ravers remain, and they board a train with the country’s locals, all sitting in silence together, all taking the same road away from wherever this is. The music’s over, and they’re going back home.
When speaking about Sirât, Laxe has focused primarily on his own respect for and identification with rave culture and its participants, and how important it was for him to focus on the characters’ relationships. Of the raves, “The dance floor is a ritual space. It is a place where you connect … with your wounds, with your fragility. … Raving can be likened to art and spirituality. It’s all about pushing your limits.” Of the found-family structure: “It fuels a sense of hope. It’s been increasingly hard to live in this world, but a new family pushes us to take better care of others.” Of how the film treats its characters: “These people embrace their scars, their imperfections. … The film becomes a communion of those scars.” Of its impact on the audience: “I am inclined to believe that many people feel lighter after watching it. They feel that there is a reason for and a way out of their pain.”
Laxe cares deeply about these characters, and he sees what they’re going through as a cathartic odyssey. What gets ignored in this framing, though, is the fact that these deserts clearly aren’t abandoned. They aren’t empty places for these Europeans to enforce their own fantasies of rebirth through SoundCloud. They have colonial histories that led to those land mines, and they have citizens who don’t have the same ability as these ravers to cross borders as they please. The land mines aren’t existential challenges; they’re very real indications of the history that the Europeans thought didn’t apply to them. (The incongruity of Laxe naming his film after the Muslim belief that everyone after death must cross an obstacle-laden bridge to reach paradise, setting his film in a Muslim country, and then delivering a film this narrow in its perspective is mind-boggling.) To party in these places with no sense of that context is a shockingly self-involved thing to do, and to suggest that the journey the ravers are on is something karmic and cosmic that helps them reconcile their pain, rather than a reflection of their own myopia, is odd. These European outcasts believe that they’ve crafted a symbiotic relationship with the desert—they found these places and gave them a purpose, and these allegedly underexplored corners of Northern Africa gave them a home—but by the end of Sirât, the ancientness of the desert endures. The ravers don’t.
***
In Sinners, music reveals. It accentuates the film’s fascination with how money, as the Wu-Tang Clan once intoned, rules everything around its characters, how it’s used as self-assurance by the well-meaning living, a weapon by their malevolent counterparts, and a way for the undead to connect with the innocent. It’s an evil made necessary by the system in which we live, and it’s the evil everyone understands. Think of Cornbread, turned into a vampire, trying to talk his way past Delta Slim back into Club Juke. When his suggestion of “being kind to one another, and being polite” doesn’t work, and when his appeal that “we is one peoples” doesn’t work, he falls back on one last attempt at connection: “Can I at least get my money?” Delta Slim would be softened by that, wouldn’t he? Wouldn’t Cornbread be recognizably himself if he at least wanted to get paid?
None of this is a judgment; none of this is a suggestion that anyone in Sinners deserves anything that happens to them. (Except for the KKK, who absolutely earned getting murdered.) Instead, the money of it all is a way for Coogler to link together various groups and generations who have been subjugated similarly and who found music as an outlet for their pain; it’s a commonality of experience as much as the singing and dancing is. That layering of theme and intention and spectacle is what makes Sinners so rich, so dense, and so sneakily straightforward; like all great horror, Sinners is operating on levels that go as deep inside its characters as the blood and gore it splatters onscreen. Unlike Sirât, which uses music as a distraction for both its characters and its viewers, Sinners asks us to consider the form as an expression of truth in a world full of lies—capitalism, racism, and even Christianity are all reasons for the blues. Sirât may show us a path to a more enlightened future. But by making its enemies so plain, and its joys so triumphant, Sinners actually walks it.