Is There a Post-Credits Scene?

Ever since Ryan Coogler made his feature film debut with 2013’s Fruitvale Station, he has been a filmmaker to watch. He’s a student of film who understands that cinema is a transformative experience, and it seems that with each project, Coogler has been building to his magnum opus: Sinners. Coogler’s latest is described as a period supernatural horror film, but it blends various genres and themes without missing a beat. It’s a comment on African American culture and art and its everlasting influence on others who wish to appropriate it without giving those who created it the proper credit. At the heart of the film is the artistry of music – namely blues – and its power to conjure up spirits, some good and some bad.

Sinners is Coogler’s masterpiece, and his creative voice resonates across the film’s 137-minute runtime. Along for the ride, with other notable talent, is Michael B. Jordan, an actor who rose to breakthrough fame alongside Coogler with Fruitvale Station, and who has remained creatively involved with every Coogler project on some level. Martin Scorsese has Leonardo DiCaprio, and Ryan Coogler has Michael B. Jordan.

Sinners

4.5
/5

Release Date

April 18, 2025

Runtime

138 Minutes

What Happens in ‘Sinners’?

Sinners is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932 and follows the ambitions of two African-American twin brothers named Smoke and Stack (both portrayed by Michael B. Jordan in a career-best performance). They have returned from the big city of Chicago to Jim Crow Mississippi after dabbling with the likes of Al Capone, realizing that they have very little affection for the big city and a stronger desire to return home to create something great.

Smoke and Stack have set their sights on an old mill in the area and their dream is to turn it into a juke joint to give the Blacks in the area, who are bogged down by stressful hard labor and the weight of racism, a place to forget about their troubles and enjoy dancing around to blues music until they sweat their worries away, at least for the night.

Smoke and Stack are smart enough to realize they need help to make their opening night a success. They first recruit their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton in his feature film debut). Also along for the ride is Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), Bo Chow (Yao) and his wife Grace (Li Jun Li), Cornbread (Omar Miller), and finally Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a woman that Smoke shares a delicate past with that still is an open wound for the duo today due to the loss of their young child. Also in the mix is Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), a white woman with whom Stack shares a past that also hasn’t been mended. The feelings are raw, but the affections are still clearly there.

Smoke and Stack believe they have all of their ducks in a row. They know they face opposition from the Ku Klux Klan, but there is another evil brewing in small-town Mississippi that they don’t know about, and they are blood-hungry vampires. However, they don’t behave like vampires in the traditional sense. When they consume, they take in much more, and when they come upon Smoke and Stack’s juke joint, they’re ready to absorb everything they can while spreading their own image of diversity and equality.

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What Is the Deeper Meaning of ‘Sinners’?

Vampirism as a Metaphor for Cultural Appropriation

As previously stated, Sinners is more than a traditional vampire flick. Coogler is using vampirism as another form of thievery, so to speak. The vampires, led by the charismatic Remmick (Jack O’Connell), find themselves drawn to the juke joint when they hear Sammie’s singing, suggesting that there is something so primal about his music that summons this evil to them. The film balances the notion that this music is so strong that it can conjure spirits of the future (something conveyed in the best sequence of the film that visually showcases the history and evolution of Black music across various genres), but it can also call upon evil. In this case, it’s the vampires, who literally want a taste of Sammie to absorb his talents.

Racial appropriation has been a topic of conversation for decades. Whether the discussion is country music, rock’n’roll, R&B, or hip-hop, the debate rages on about how African Americans cultivated these musical genres, and yet the bulk of the credit, particularly for country music and rock, has been linked to white culture. The film speaks to that by making the vampires hungry for knowledge that they claim they want to enjoy, but reading between the lines, they want to carry it on and spread this knowledge as their own.

One moment that drives this home is after feeding on Grace’s husband, Bo Chow. Remmick not only has his memories, which pinpoint the location of their daughter they left back at their store in town, but he can also effortlessly speak Chinese, something he conveys most obscenely as he taunts Grace to either be let in or join his clan of vampires that is growing outside the juke joint.

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The Possibility of Real Freedom

Vampires are also about seduction, and the seduction that Remmick uses to entice the African-American flock is the potential to truly live free. He suggests that it would be better to live as a vampire than as a second-rate citizen who is only used for labor and is constantly looked down upon. Since vampires can only be invited in, many of these conversations take place at the door of the juke joint as the vampires linger outside.

By turning a couple (Lola Kirke and Peter Dreimanis), Remmick learns that Smoke and Stack were never going to have that old mill free and clear. The person they bought it from — who insists that the Klan no longer exists around there — was merely going to sell it to them and then immediately strip it from their hands as he arrived with more of his people to kill everyone and take the mill back as his own. It was never a clean sell, and despite their best intentions, this avenue never really allowed them to be free.

There is a lot of bloodletting by the end of Sinners, and many people meet their demise on both sides. Thanks to Annie, a noted Hoodoo conjurer, she’s able to identify what evil they are facing and how to potentially stop them. All the traditional vampire tactics are used in battle, most notably garlic, stake through the heart, and silver, and it’s this knowledge that makes it more of an even fight, although once the vampires find their way into the music establishment, their savagery becomes something that easily can’t be defeated. Several key characters are turned throughout the night, most notably Mary and Stack, resulting in a climax where Smoke has to kill his brother. However, everything isn’t as it seems.

Smoke Gets a Poignant Ending

While Remmick is taken out by Sammie (poetically with the very guitar that summoned him in their direction) and most of the others burst into flames as the sun begins to rise, the demise of two key characters isn’t shown on screen. However, before that reveal, now that Smoke knows the plan was to double-cross the brothers and take the mill from them after making the sell, he lets out his own retribution on the Klan as they descend on the location, becoming a one-man army against the very group meant to oppress him.

Smoke is fatally wounded during the barrage of bullets, but the moment becomes one of spiritual relief. Annie, who is killed by Smoke after she is bitten by a vampire (something she made him promise he would do), calls for him to be reunited with her in the afterlife, alongside their young son Elijah, whom they lost as a baby. Smoke gets his own brand of freedom in the end by allowing his soul to be free and with two people he truly loves.

Sammie also escapes and is given a choice to throw down his guitar by his father and embrace God. Proving that the call of music is far too strong, even though he has seen firsthand what evil it can bring, Sammie chooses to hold onto his passion and heads away with the instrument that gives him life.

The Mid-Credits Scene Offers a Final Conclusion

The film is finished off with a mid-credits scene that takes place in 1992 and shows Sammie (now played by blues guitarist and singer Buddy Guy) performing with a band, doing what he loves the most, at a local bar. As the bar is closing up, he’s notified that two more guests want to come through even though the bar is closed, and they’ll pay two hundred dollars to enter. Sammie allows it, only to realize that this duo needed to be invited in to come into the establishment.

It’s soon revealed that the pair of vampires in question are Stack and Mary, now dressed to embrace the hip-hop culture that became prevalent during the early ’90s, proving the notion that these vampires desire to adapt and learn as time goes on. It’s revealed that Smoke couldn’t bring himself to kill Stack and that he would only let him live if he promised to let Sammie be, something he honors. Seeing how old Sammie is now, he gets closer to him and senses that his time on this Earth won’t be much longer.

Stack offers him freedom from his mortality, but Sammie turns it down. It becomes a moment of deep respect, honoring a promise Stack made all those years ago and letting Sammie go out on his own terms. As the pair leaves, Sammie tells them that before all the darkness and bloodshed, the passion for music, laughter, and togetherness was the best moment of his life, something both Mary and Stack agree with. It’s clear that Stack and Mary will carry on through the years, absorbing more knowledge to spread with their own flock, but Sammie will find peace with the memories he made all those years ago, when it becomes time for him to take his last breath.

Sinners is now playing in theaters.