The Scripture of Suffering: 'Sinners' Is Ryan Coogler’s Blues-Drenched American Reckoning

By Natalie McCarty

There are movies that entertain, and there are movies that change the air in the room. Sinners, however, does more than that. It swallows you whole.

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From the opening frame, it builds a world heavy with inheritance. Ryan Coogler, beyond directing, curates. Every object on a shelf, every glance across a room, every offhand phrase carries the weight of a buried life, an unsung war, a hymn or horror kept alive in the body even after history forgets. 

In a time when it feels almost impossible to make a soulful blockbuster or an indie that breaks through, Coogler has done both. Sinners sets a new standard for what movies should be. 

The film is meant to haunt you. To leave you pulling threads for years after watching. Coogler has made a reckoning in a blues opera. A haunted dream about what it means to inherit memory, pain, hope, music, rage, and myth—and still find a way to carry forward. 

Vibrating with tension and poetry, soaked in blood, brass, and dirt, Sinners is a love letter to the blues, but also a retelling of America, seen through a lens of sweat, sorrow, and mythology. It breathes history and wails like a blues guitar. There is no wasted moment here; every detail is intentional. It’s a masterclass in both directing and editing.

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While every performance in Sinners is unimaginably strong, Michael B. Jordan’s dual portrayal of Smoke and Stack is something else entirely. Each character is so nuanced, so physically and emotionally distinct, that the hat color cue (while rich with symbolism) quickly becomes unnecessary; you can tell them apart almost immediately through Jordan’s lived-in mannerisms alone.

Smoke is all trauma and tension, a man hardened by survival, steeled against feeling. Stack is wide-eyed with cautious optimism, a dreamer with dirt still under his fingernails.

Jordan plays these two men so devastatingly that you can feel the weight of their shared past in every glance, every flinch. What’s most crushing is the realization that they aren’t truly separate: they are halves of a whole—fractured, refracted through time, bound by their collective history of grief, violence, and dreams.

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These brothers are modeled after biblical figures, too. Cain and Abel, yes, but also David and Saul. Religious symbolism courses throughout the film in dirtied crosses over doorframes, in the communion-like rituals of sharing song and drink, in the tension between sin and grace. The juke joint becomes a church. The music becomes prayer. And every drop of blood asks whether salvation is even possible in a land built on bones.

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The film’s use of vampirism adds another devastating layer through its hungry metaphors: colonialism with teeth, industry with fangs, addiction, appropriation. They are drawn to the sound—the soul—because what’s more valuable than the soul? And what’s more tragic than watching it drained for profit?

There are so many deep thematic storylines moving through Sinners that capturing them all feels impossible. You could write one article, or twenty, and still barely scratch the surface as Coogler constructs this film with such meticulous emotional care. He doesn’t spell everything out as he trusts you to feel it.

There’s a subtle nod to the Irish Potato Famine, threaded with quiet parallels to the Choctaw Nation’s extraordinary act of solidarity: In 1847, just a few years after their own forced removal during the Trail of Tears, the Choctaw raised and sent a donation to aid the people of Ireland. It was only $170 at the time, but a profound gift of humanitarian relief, a gesture of compassion across continents and suffering. 

Coogler also honors another buried history: the Chinese presence in the Mississippi Delta, so often erased from narratives of the American South. In the late 1800s, Chinese immigrants, originally brought in to replace enslaved labor after Emancipation, built lives in Black communities, forging complicated, sometimes quietly radical bonds. 

These moments swell into something bigger: a symbol of shared resistance and transhistorical empathy. That spirit pulses through Sinners in the ways communities hold one another. A few hours of liberation carved out from the violence of segregation and the weight of generational injustice. 

Coogler does not spoon-feed history. He braids it into the fabric of the movie, just as trauma and memory are braided into identity.

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The music, which feels divinely channeled, is one of the most brilliantly composed scores ever. Ludwig Göransson unearths these melodies from the muddy roots of the Delta. You hear the cracked timber of Robert Johnson's guitar, the anguished wail of gospel choirs, the iron weight of prison songs, but also unexpected mutations: metal riffs distorted into dirges, DJ intercuts, Chinese guzheng melodies ghosting beneath old banjo rhythms.

It’s what happens when cultures collide under centuries of pressure, bleeding and borrowing, breaking and remaking. Göransson captures that collision with a score that is as sorrowful as it is beautiful. 

And then, of course, the infamous dance scene, paired with one of the original songs. That scene was essentially the essence of everything I study—how dance, culture, and religion intersect to bring collective unity, enriched by individual identity, yet woven together in one moment between those who live in both worlds. It’s ceremony. It’s blood memory. 

Juke joint footwork, Irish reels, ring shouts, step traditions, Chinese ribbon dances hidden in the background. I truly do not know how Coogler came up with this strikingly moving and creative portrayal of cultures interlocked through migration, struggle, and shared soil. The camera lingers, hypnotized, as are we. One of the best scenes in cinema, ever.

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There’s no category for what Sinners is. Sinners is something else entirely. It’s impossible to even catch it all with how richly deep this film is. 

Ultimately, this is what happens when art remembers its roots and dares to rewrite its future.

It’s a map of bloodlines and broken dreams.

It’s a prayer.

It’s a warning.

It’s a resurrection.

And when you walk out of the theater, you’ll realize: You’re carrying some of it with you, too.