Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” (2025) might be packaged and marketed as a genre film, but, in reality, it is a thinly veiled allegorical tale that uses vampire horror tropes as narrative tools. Much like “From Dusk Till Dawn,” Coogler’s film follows two brothers who are suddenly attacked by a group of vampires. Still, despite the minor similarities in their arcs, Michael B. Jordan’s starrer is cut above the rest because of its thematic depth and resonance. It is clever and visceral without being didactic. Despite its widespread appeal, you can sense that it comes from a deeply personal space. For a film that seamlessly blends several genres of music and narrative in its roughly two-hour duration, there is plenty to unpack in “Sinners,” and it’s not just about who survives or dies in the end.
Spoilers Ahead
Sinners (2025) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
“Sinners” is a genre-fluid supernatural horror film set in the Jim Crow era, written and directed by Ryan Coogler. Autumn Durald Arkapaw shot the movie, and Ludwig Göransson composed the music. Michael B. Jordan stars in the dual lead role. Wunmi Mosaku, Li Jun Li, Miles Caton, Delroy Lindo, Hailee Steinfeld, and Jack O’Connell make up the central cast.
What happens in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners?
Set in the 1930s, Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” follows Stack and Smoke (Michael B. Jordan), two identical twins, who return to their hometown in Mississippi after spending a while in Chicago. They put all their stolen money into buying a local sawmill to turn it into a juke joint with imported liquor. However, the racist landowner does not show them any respect. The twins warn him to leave with the money and never cross paths again. Then, they recruit local musicians to perform, which includes pianist Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo), singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson), and their young cousin, guitarist Sammie (Miles Caton).
The twins seek a local Chinese shopkeeper couple, Grace (Li Jun Li) and Bo (Yao), to help renovate their new establishment. They also bring their old friend Cornbread (Omar Benson Miller) to be the doorman. Smoke reunites with his estranged wife, Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), but they do not see eye to eye on the matters of their faith and money. She believes her rituals kept him and Stack safe, but he recalls that they couldn’t save their daughter. Still, unlike him, she does not see money as a way to salvation. On the joint’s opening night, he refuses to lower the entry prices, but she and Stack convince him otherwise.
Along with others, Stack’s old flame, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), shows up there and adds to the tension between the twins. Stack asks her to leave, but feels bad about abandoning her, once again, after leaving her to get married to a white man. She stays back and opens up to the patrons about her biracial heritage. As it happens, Sammie starts to perform, which conjures the spirits from the past, present, and future under the same roof for a mystical gathering. However, it also invites some vultures hoping to encroach on their personal space.
How does Remmick turn the patrons into vampires?
While people gather at the twins’ juke joint, Remmick (Jack O’Connell) rushes toward a house. A Klans-affiliated couple invites him in even though he looks battered. The Indigenous vampire hunters, who’re on the lookout for Remmick, warn the couple, but they pay no heed to these concerns. Shortly after, Remmick turns the couple into vampires. He takes them to the juke joint and asks to be let in and perform in exchange for money. Upon refusal, they point at Mary, who passes for white, but everyone considers her a part of the family. So, the vampires stay nearby outside the joint.
Mary understands that Stack and Smoke need money to run their business. So, she decides to go speak with the three to see if they mean well. That’s when they turn her into a vampire. She returns to the joint, lures Stack, and turns him into one. As it happens, Cornbread goes outside to relieve himself and gets turned as well.. He returns and asks Delta Slim to let him in. Annie finds it odd that he is asking for permission. So, Cornbread asks for his pay for the night. Smoke offers it and gets almost bitten until Cornbread gets shot.
By then, they had realized that Mary turned Stack into a vampire. They lock him inside a room, but he escapes and attacks them. Annie distracts him with pickled garlic and makes him leave. In the wake of these incidents, the patrons are told to leave. However, they can’t save themselves from the vampires, who turn them into their own. Bo, who walks out to get his car, isn’t spared either. Remmick adds to Grace’s worries as he also hopes to turn others, including her daughter.
Also Read: Sinners (2025) Movie Review
Sinners (2025) Movie Ending Explained:
Who gets spared and who survives in the end?
Grace, Annie, Smoke, Sammie, Pearline, and Delta Slim stay inside the joint as the vampires surround them. Smoke hopes to wait till dawn, hoping the sun will destroy the vampires. However, the other survivors believe they shouldn’t just stay there while others suffer and insist they face the vampires. They know that vampires do not enter until they are allowed to. So, they invite the blood-suckers, who kill Grace, Annie, and Delta Slim. Annie’s death traumatizes Mary, who runs away.
Remmick attacks Sammie and Pearline and turns the latter into them. Pearline tells Sammie to flee, but Remmick catches up with him. So, Sammie beats Remmick with his guitar, accidentally destroying it. By then, the sun rises and incinerates the vampires. Smoke leaves from his fight with Stack to get into another fight with the landowner and the Klansmen, whom Remmick warned them about earlier that night. He kills everyone but gets brutally wounded and presumably dies. So, even after surviving the night, he couldn’t escape death.
What happens to Sammie in the end?
Before this brutal gunfire, he tells Sammie to flee. Since Sammie’s guitar-driven music lures the vampires (representing the devil) toward their joint, Sammie is expected to bury his broken guitar and abandon his dreams. However, Sammie does not want others to define what the music means to him. He refuses to seek salvation by giving up his dreams. That’s why the film’s final moments (also its opening moments) show Sammie, drenched in blood, driving up to his father’s church, and walking inside with his broken guitar, but he refuses to destroy it, much to his father’s dismay.
Sinners (2025) Movie Post-Credit Scenes Explained:
What does Sammie’s fate represent?
“Sinners” features two end-credit scenes, one appears in the middle while a snippet appears at the very end. The scene takes place in 1992 when Sammie is an old and popular blues singer. After a soulful performance, he gets a visit from Stack and Mary. Stack reveals that, on the fateful night, Smoke spared him in exchange for sparing Sammie. He asks Sammie to be one of them and to live his fame to his heart’s content. Sammie refuses that offer. Stack doesn’t persuade any further, but he acknowledges that the fateful day was the best of his life. That was the last time he saw the sun and felt free.
Sammie also believes that it was the best day of his life since it gave him the courage not to abandon music. Instead of being immortal like Stack, he chooses to live on through his music because that way, he won’t be trapped in a system that only professes freedom but limits it in other ways. So, instead of being in that trap, he chooses his independence, where he fights injustice by reclaiming his acumen and cultural roots instead of hiding behind an illusion of freedom. Blues music becomes his way of cultural assertion, despite those appropriating it for their own gain. The post-credit snippet shows him singing This Little Light of Mine as a youth in the church.
Sinners (2025) Movie Themes Analyzed:
Music, Money, and Cultural Assimilation
Music is an inseparable part of “Sinners,” and it is used as a soft power for cultural assimilation, appropriation, and assertion. It connects people irrespective of their cultural or ethnic backgrounds, but it is also used as a way to manipulate others under the guise of being a part of an unprejudiced community. The bloodthirsty vampires desire to get everyone under their wings by preaching ‘love and fellowship,’ which sounds innocent and helps them cover their sinful motives. It tricks the oppressed into believing that the oppressors mean well, while it’s anything but that.
Money is also used as a tool to turn the characters into a bigger capital-driven group, claiming it is devoid of any bigotry. However, Irish immigrant Rimmick becomes the group’s leader, which adds another layer to the film’s parable. He likely represents the Irish people who fled oppression by the English to the United States. Despite being on the receiving end of pain and torture, he gets affiliated with the Klansmen. He becomes both the victim and perpetrator of the assimilation that uses the intoxicating nature of music, money, or a sense of kinship to entice people. Unfortunately, Mary also becomes one of the victims, whose cultural dissonance becomes the connecting thread between the two worlds.
So, it may not be a coincidence that the subtle but noticeable color coding was used to differentiate the twins. Stack appears in red and Smoke appears in blue. They represent two sides of a coin. Stack gets lured into the web of a dominant group, while Smoke stays behind to protect his community. Smoke means well but is also trapped in a capital-driven belief system that ensures power through wealth. He is also someone who lost his infant child. So, money represents something personal to him. Regardless, they both broadly represent the plight of people of color in the Jim Crow era, who faced persecution or were forced into submission.
