Note: Spoilers for Sinners follow.
Today’s review comes to us from Noelle K. Bowles. She teaches literature and writing courses at Kent State University at Trumbull, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature, the fantastic, creative writing, women’s literature, and the basic writing courses everyone loves to hate. When not preparing class materials or grading papers, she spends her time kissing her Frenchie, complaining about cat hair, cooking Indian cuisine, and shaping clay into ceramic monsters… oh, and reviewing television and film.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners is what you get when you mix the blues, Hoodoo, gangsters, the Ku Klux Klan, and vampires in the Jim Crow South. The primary action of the film takes place within a 24-hour period, and the nexus around which the action turns is Sammie Moore (Miles Caton), aka Preacher Boy, a sharecropper blues guitarist whose music literally transcends time. Coogler’s film is far more sophisticated than similar genre blending efforts like Dusk ‘til Dawn, in its meticulous cultural and spiritual representations that connect directly to African Traditional Religions (ATR) and their practitioners.
On the run from robbing other gangsters, twins Elijiah Smoke and Elias Stack (Michael B. Jordan in both roles) return to their hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi in October of 1932 and enlist their cousin Sammie to play for the grand opening of their juke joint that very night. Sammie’s father, the preacher Jedidiah Moore (Saul Williams), warns Sammie against what he sees as sinful celebration: “You keep dancing with the devil, one day he’s gonna follow you home.” But Sammie cannot resist the pull of his cousins’ new venture and the chance to play for an appreciative audience.
And, indeed the devil, or at least a devil, does materialize; however, Jed Moore’s closely held faith will not save Sammy or anyone else. In fact, Christianity winds up as mere background noise, for whatever salvation occurs within the film relies on ATR, particularly Hoodoo.
Hoodoo is best defined as “a healing and spiritual tradition that is embraced by people from a number of religious backgrounds,” according to cultural anthropologist Tony Kail, rather than a “codified religion with specific deities, clergy, and rituals” and draws heavily, though not exclusively, on West and Central African traditions.
Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) performing rootwork in her Hoodoo shop in Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS (2025) (Warner Bros)
While Sammie is ostensibly the film’s protagonist, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) – rootworker, cook, shopkeeper, mother to a dead child, and Elijiah Smoke’s lover – is its moral center. Her voiceover begins the film, telling us that “there are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death, conjuring spirits from the past and the future.” She names three examples: the ancient Irish (fili), Choctaw (firekeepers), and West African (griots). “This gift can bring healing to their communities,” she explains, “but it also attracts evil.”
Although Annie’s is the first voice we hear, we do not meet her until Smoke, seeking out a cook for the juke joint, drives out to the rural cabin that serves as her Hoodoo shop and home.
Our first indication that we have moved outside the bounds of traditional Christianity is when Smoke approaches and then kneels beside the nearby grave of a child marked by a white rock with the baby’s black handprint, a stoppered bottle of milk, and a small carved ebony rod standing upright beside the stone. The front of Annie’s cabin store is painted “haint blue,” a color with significant cultural implications that is now so popular that Sherwin Williams offers it in several shades. According to one of the film’s special features, the color is “said to keep away mosquitos, but it’s also said to keep out haints,” that is, evil spirits.
Haint blue has been used by the Gullah Geechee people, descendants of Africans enslaved on cotton, rice, and indigo plantations of the Lowcountry (the shorelands extending from South Carolina into northern coastal Florida) for centuries as a protection against evil spirits, especially on porch ceilings. According to Gullah Geechee tradition (as well as others), spirits cannot cross water, so, in mimicking the color of water, haint blue works as a ward against lost spirits crossing into households.
This special feature further notes that Annie’s clothing mirrors the front of the cabin, using “Hoodoo-inspired colors and symbolism.” And the color itself has grimmer implications: the indigo from which it is derived helped to fuel the transatlantic slave trade and funded plantations, thus becoming a source of protection and horrific suffering.
Inside Annie’s store are two little girls, one of whom asks for “a pinch of High John,” which might refer to only the root itself or be a reference John the Conqueror, a root used in folk medicine and Hoodoo (as well as other traditions). “When John the Conqueror is ‘dressed’ with Heart’s cologne, it becomes ‘High John the Conqueror,’” Kail explains in A Secret History of Memphis Hoodoo. “When dressed with Heart’s Cologne and prayer, it becomes ‘High John the Conqueror, King of the World.’” In correspondence with The Wild Hunt, Kail notes that “Heart’s Cologne” may refer to Hoyt’s Cologne, a popular cologne used to feed mojo bags. Annie accepts plantation scrip as payment for the root, knowing the girl has no other form of currency, and folds the root into a mojo bag before handling to the child.
Regarding the set for the store, the special features tell us that “the set decorator filled the shelves of Annie’s house with general food items, Black hair care products, and Hoodoo items replicated from an authentic 1930s publication found during research.” Viewers keyed into Hoodoo practices and products know immediately what Annie is doing and selling aside from dry goods like sugar and beans.
After the girls leave, Smoke calls the plantation scrip “make-believe shit” and offers Annie American dollars instead, but Annie rejects them, saying “your money come with blood.” Changing the subject to attack her source of income, Smoke says, “You know woman, I been all over this world. In cars, ships, trains. I seen men die ways I didn’t even know was possible. But I ain’t never saw no roots, no demons, no ghosts, no magic. Just power. And only money can get you that.”
He’s wrong, of course, as he and any doubtful viewers will later learn. “You fool,” Annie replies. “All the war, or whatever the hell else you been doin’ in Chicago, and you back here in front of me. Two arms, two legs, two eyes, and a brain that work. How you know I ain’t pray and work every root my grandmamma taught me to keep you and that crazy brother of yours safe every day since you been gone?”
“So why those roots ain’t work on our baby, then?” he asks. She doesn’t know, but she knows they work for him. And despite his doubt and dismissal, beneath his coat, Smoke still wears the mojo bag Annie made for him years ago and returns it to her to refresh its power. She prays over the bag, calling on “Ashe,” the Yoruba word for the life force inherent in all things in the Yoruba cosmology.
“The portrayal of rootwork in the movie is very true to form,” says Kail. “The use of herbs in healing and protection are very consistent with the actual culture.”
The film gives us this work when Annie lays out Smoke’s mojo bag, dressing it with whiskey, a tradition that Kail connects through slave narrative and practices of the Lower Congo and Memphis in the early 20th century. “The movie is a class in African and African-American traditions and does a magnificent job in portraying both in a non-sensational manner,” says Kail. “One of the first things that is communicated is that Hoodoo is not a fearful evil practice. Annie works to help and heal, not curse and hex.”
Rootwork is not Annie’s only skill derived from her ancestors. Because of stories passed down, she is the first to understand what she and her friends are facing when Stack is attacked and seemingly killed by his recently turned lover, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld). She stops the doorman Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) from entering by refusing an invitation after he wanders away to relieve himself, and she throws garlic juice in Stack’s face when he bursts through the door of the storeroom where he died, causing him to run outside. Annie then instructs the small band of survivors about what they need: “garlic, wood, silver, and holy water.” And she’s the one who knows the differences between haints and vampires.
We see her cast bones (shells, coins, stones, and bones) on a nearby craps table, seeking insight. “The soul gets stuck in the body,” she says, explaining the curse of the vampires. “Can’t rejoin the ancestors. Cursed to live here with all this hate.” She then makes Smoke promise that, if she is bitten, he will free her before she turns, telling him, “I got somebody on the other side wait’n for me,” and we know she thinks of her dead child.
Michael B. Jordan as Smoke, wearing his protective mojo bag, in Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS (2025) (Warner Bros)
Smoke follows through with the promise when Stack bites her in the chaotic battle that soon follows, but Annie’s power and influence transcend death: Stack can fight but not bite or kill Smoke because the mojo bag repels him. When Smoke prepares for his final vengeance near the end of the film, he pulls the bag from his neck as a sign that he is ready for death to reunite him with Annie and their child, and we see the three of them together as Smoke transitions to the spirit world with Annie’s guidance and protection.
The place that Sammie and his music magic occupy is even more intersectional than Annie’s. When he plays his guitar, we are treated to a scene in which ancestors, descendants, and even a god appear, hailing from a multitude of origins: Acholi dancers (Uganda and South Sudan); Breakdancers (South Bronx); Fulani (West Africa); and a water-sleeves dancer from the Peking Opera (China) and Sun Wukong (the Monkey King – China) appear in connection to the Chinese characters Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo Chow (Yao) respectively. Perhaps most hauntingly impressive is the Zaouli masked dancer (Ivory Coast). Finally, Sammie’s music and its temporal transcendence attract the vampire Remmick (Jack O’Connell) to Club Juke in fulfillment of Jed Moore’s warning.
The power of music is also what draws Remmick to his first on-screen victims: Klansman Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and his wife Joan (Lola Kirke). On the run from Choctaw vampire hunters, bare-chested with smoking flesh, Remmick drops into frame before the isolated home of fellow musicians, for Bert plays the banjo and Joan the guitar. Remmick flashes ancient gold coins and appeals to racial solidarity against the Choctaw to wheedle an invitation across the threshold. The careful viewer can surmise that the Choctaw pursue Remmick for attempting to prey on their firekeeper.
Indeed, “the movie’s introduction also features a short snippet of a Choctaw war chant, performed by [director of the tribe’s Chahta Immi Cultural Center Jay] Wesley’s daughter, Jaeden Wesley […] While recording, Jaeden Wesley said the filmmakers told her they wanted the Choctaw people to hear their music in the movie,” Sophie Bates reveals in the Associated Press.
Unlike the other ethnicities represented, the Choctaw know what they hunt and that they need to depart before sunset. The Choctaw scout (Mark L. Patrick) speaks to Joan in English (while Bert is attacked upstairs) and his fellow vampire hunters in Choctaw. The film has won praise from members of the Choctaw tribe for its faithful adherence to accurate cultural and linguistic representations, much as with its faithfulness to African Traditional Religions.
Remmick and his new thralls, Bert and Joan, initially approach Club Juke as wandering minstrels plucking out the contemporary (1927) “Pick Poor Robin Clean” blues tune by Luke Jordan, but shift to the Irish folk ballad “Go, Lassie, Go” (c. 1821) when luring Mary into their grasp. Once most of the Club Juke crowd falls victim to the vampires, Remmick leads them in a darkly threatening rendition of “Road to Dublin” (1841). Remmick’s fascination with music and his very old coins suggest that Remmick is what we get when ancient Irish fili (poet/seer/bards) go bad.
Miles Caton as Sammie, playing guitar in Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS (2025) (Warner Bros]
When Remmick hears Sammie speak as the survivors confront him in the doorway of the club, he says, “Sammie! You the one I came for. I sensed you. I wanna see my people again. I’m trapped here, but your gifts can bring ‘em to me.” Remmick even offers to let the others live if they turn Sammie over to him, though his sincerity is doubtful. In consuming other musician/storytellers, Remmick seeks his original human origins.
Coogler’s vampires adhere to some traditional limitations: sunlight, aversion to garlic, holy water, silver, and a wooden stake through the heart, but not others as Sammie learns to his dismay. Finally captured by Remmick, his face raked by the monster’s claws, Sammie falls back on The Lord’s Prayer which, to his horror, Remmick joins him in reciting. “Long ago, the men who stole my father’s land forced these words upon us,” he says. “I hated those men, but the words still bring me comfort.” Ireland began its conversion to Christianity in the early 400s CE, and his memory evokes another, earlier consumption of people and culture, but Sinners adds a twist because Remmick’s words recall something said earlier in the film. “The blues wasn’t forced on us like that religion,” Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) told Sammie. “Nah, son, we brought this with us from home. It’s the magic what we do; it’s sacred and big.” In acceptance of Christianity – or at least its forms – Remmick is more thoroughly colonized than he cares to admit.
Conversely, although he has a momentary lapse in this scene, Sammie remains true to the blues and rejects the faith of his father and the demonic fellowship offered by Remmick and finally, much later, by Stack. Ancestral culture, not a colonized one, sustains Sammie Moore.
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