Set in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1932, Sinners is a fun vampire flick that expands into a more profound exploration of racism, community, and what signifies freedom. The vampiric villain, a white man of unknown origins, searches for community and his next meal. When the blues music from a young Black man summons him and his newly-transformed minions to add to his ranks, the living must fight to make it to sunrise. Sinners is at once a look at genuine community and the faux vampiric community that drowns with white entitlement at its helm.

Written and directed by Ryan Coogler (Black Panther, Creed), the movie centers primarily around twin brothers, Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan (Creed, Fruitvale Station). After returning to Mississippi from Chicago, they purchased a building from a white man with plans to open Club Juke that night. They enlist the help of old friends and partners. Here is where the “communities” show their differences.

Sinners Describes Community Through Action

When the twins approach their friends to work at the club, they view each of them as people with lives outside of who they are to the budding entrepreneurs. With couple Grace and Bo Chow, played by Li Jun Li (Babylon, Wu Assassins) and Yao (#LookAtMe, Tiong Bahru Social Club), respectively, Sinners shows their relationship, businesses, and daughter. Smoke does not try to subdue or minimize their experiences when he approaches them to create something for the club. They are equals. Here, the movie mirrors real life, showing how marginalized communities often come together to support and aid each other. After all, people of color all experience the trivializing, minimizing, and dehumanizing efforts of white people.

Cannot Evade Inherent Whiteness

The villain, Remmick, played by Jack O’Connell (Back to Black, Unbroken), mentions how two people he recently turned were KKK. As vampires, they now are a community formed by racist concepts. They share each other’s thoughts and mimic Remmick. They no longer sound or behave like people separate from him. And it’s clear, despite his claims, that much of his behavior and actions are rooted in the white experience. Even his blaming young Sam, played by Miles Caton, reeks of white people faulting their targets for the harm they inflict on them.

Being in a community with white people often means forsaking aspects that make us “the other.” In particular, Black people have to do this for white comfort, whether it’s code-switching or deferring to white wants. Sinners captures this abandonment of self in the growing vampire group. Once turned, everyone dances, sings, and frolics to Remmick’s music and dance, but it’s not a genuine community because they’ve lost their free will.

And it’s a fantasy depiction of what white people often tell Black people is the “cure” to racism. We just need to abandon talking about it – and also everything that makes us Black, Latinx, Indigenous, etc. If we do that and match ourselves to white people, then racism ends, they say. It’s a small-minded, white-tailored solution/lie that Remmick apparently believes.

What They Want Matters Most

Even Mary, played by Hailee Steinfeld (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, The Edge of Seventeen), is not exempt from this white mindset. Despite her character being part-Black, she moves through the world as a white woman. It’s eerie how easily Mary betrays the Black community, even after Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) calls Mary “family.” It’s another example of how our white friends, no matter how close, can cast aside their community with us for the familiar and privileged one that gives them more benefits.

Not Much Difference

White people over the years have created all kinds of insults and slurs for communities outside of their own. In that, there is little difference between the bloodsuckers and them. They swarm and take because they feel entitled to it all. Look at gentrification. The people colonizing these communities are often the ones espousing ideals of stopping racism. Yet their actions actually perpetuate it. They destroy a community, pricing out the small businesses and residents that have lived there forever, and then move on to whatever location is the next “hip” place.

But call any of them on it, and they’ll argue you’re wrong. Because they think they know what’s best for everyone around them. And their arguments all sound the same, as though they took the same class on why white people have all the answers. It’s why Mary fades into the background, like Cornbread (played by Omar Benson Miller, Naples to New York), because who you are doesn’t matter in their community.

Too often, what looks different is just more of the same. Sinners takes this idea and creates an amazing, fun, action-filled vampire story that is so much more. Remmick might be a vampire, but he is the same as the hood-wearing white folks, the well-meaning white folks, and more. He wants to take away people’s choices and freedoms just because he can. Sinners highlights the problems white people, however well-meaning, fall into time and again: ego.