A vicious pursuit of freedom

Rated R • HBO Max/Prime Video

With a record 16 Oscar nominations and almost $280 million at the box office in 2025, Sinners is the rare modern film to have both popular appeal and adulation from the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Should Sinners win the award for best picture, it would rank as the fifth-highest-grossing film at the domestic box office among best picture winners in the last 50 years.

If I told you that a singing Irish vampire takes center stage as the primary antagonist in this particular film, you might reasonably inquire what exactly is the attraction. A closer look reveals a complex, disturbing, yet insightful exploration of people’s deep desire for freedom.

The film opens in a small town in Mississippi. It’s the era of Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the Jim Crow South. The pastor of a modest black congregation invites his son Sammie (aka “Preacherboy”) to help him deliver the next day’s sermon on 1 Corinthians 10:13. Sammie knows by heart the verse about temptation and the promise of God’s deliverance, but its spiritual significance doesn’t seem to have made its way much deeper than the boy’s short-term memory. Restless and exhausted from a week of picking cotton as a sharecropper, he takes his guitar to play the blues at the new juke joint that his cousins, charismatic twins Smoke and Stack (played masterfully by Michael B. Jordan), are establishing just outside town.

The “Smokestack twins” have recently returned to the South after working with organized crime syndicates in Chicago, and they have been “running around everywhere, looking for freedom.” Disillusioned because the same racism they knew in Mississippi had haunted them in Chicago, they have come back home. “Might as well deal with the devil we know,” Smoke explains to Sammie, but they are about to be confronted with a very different kind of devil. The twins plan to bring the black community together through music and dancing while profiting from the community’s vices of drinking and gambling. Their music has the power to “pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future”—and this power attracts vampires.

Remmick (Jack O’Connell), the singing Irish vampire, preaches a very different gospel than the one Sammie has turned his back on. His cohort of vampires lurks in the shadows just beyond the perimeter of the juke joint, tormenting those trapped inside and playing on their fears. It’s probably not a coincidence that filmmaker Ryan Coogler has white vampires preying on the black community.

Remmick promises, “I am your way out” of death and destruction. If these black revelers will only surrender their lives—let themselves be assimilated—they may gain immortality, and freedom from pain and suffering. Other people-­turned-vampires affirm the good news that union with their new community is like entering into “heaven right here on earth.” However, all their promises of fellowship and love belie the grisly reality that these undead monsters perpetrate upon the living.

Sinners portrays all manner of flawed and fallen people looking for freedom, with most characters succumbing to common temptations just like Sammie: traveling their own path rather than the straight and narrow provided by the Scriptures. These pursuits promise freedom but leave the characters in chains, caging their spirits much like the souls of the men and women trapped in the bodies of the vampires, enslaved to carnal desires. If viewers wade through Sinners’ crude dialogue and sexual content, they must brace themselves for a flood of vampire blood and gore in the film’s final act.

Sinners’ 16 nominations are not without merit: The setting is immersive, the acting is captivating, the suspense is paralyzing, and the editing creates a consistently compelling narrative. But Coogler offers a false hope.

His movie accuses Christianity of being a religion of oppression, and it turns music into a kind of liberation, even from the mortal plane. We sometimes refer to particularly powerful music as ethereal or transcendent, and the film depicts that idea in the characters’ reverence for the blues. But music can’t save us. Only the Creator of everything, including music, can do that. Music is a delightful thing, but it makes for a disappointing god.