Sinners

Okay I’m gonna break down my favorite themes and symbolism from this movie( I absolutely loved btw!!) **Ava’s All Time Favorites** **2025 Ranked ** First being Christianity and holiness and how it’s subjective. Notice how everything that the church or just the Bible deems…’unholy’ saves our surviving characters in the end. Music, while it may have attracted the devil to Sammy, defeated remmek in the end. The mojo bag and the ‘voodoo magic’ that’s they consider blasphemous or taboo saved smokes life. THE LORDS PRAYER didn’t save Sammy. And remmek could say it too, you can know the Bible, you can worship the lord, but it does not mean you follow the lord or are devout whatsoever. Remmek repeated it to give the message that this faith or prayer has been force fed to him his whole life and it will not save him. And Christianity was also passed or given to the black community through their plantation and colonization/ other forms of controlled conversion and they had a slave Bible etc. Christianity or a widespread moral or value will always be used to control marginalized groups no matter what point we are at in time. Christianity was spread to different groups also through mass genocide just as it is in the film, this shared sense of community no matter how toxic it may be draws others into the practices through a shared culture of damage and oppression.   Speaking of oppression, this brings us to culture in the movie. Specifically, culture vultures. The vampires who come to the JukeJoint are all white, the two in addition to remmeck into enticed into inviting him in thanks to their racism. These vampires quite literally suck the life or culture out of our characters, especially Haley. BUT, she was LET IN. she did not just enter this community with no invitation or welcome and prance around appropriating their black culture without understanding the struggles of living as a black American. Vampirism itself represents colonialism and white supremacy as they again, leech off the culture and then take bits and pieces of it to add to their own or to assimilate with. Bringing us to the song the vampires sing: pick poor robin clean. They literally pick parts of the black culture to pull from and add to their culture. Especially the lyric “I would’ve picked his body but it wasn’t fit to eat.” It literally means they don’t take the body of the black culture because it’s rooted in so much pain and struggle and they don’t really care for that, they care for the parts or little bits and pieces they can PICK to appropriate. Remmeck is also Irish, and through the Spotify playlist photos we can see he suffered from the famine and British colonialism. He used this shared trauma of being oppressed or controlled by the British or whites in a higher power to try and be “let in” to the black culture he wished to appropriate. He also uses the klan members hatred for colored groups to let them into their home and take advantage of them. I think Mary, although yes, she was let in, also shows this. She dresses like her black counterparts, talks like them, but does not truly know the hurt of growing up as a black person in the south. She destroyed their community from within after being influenced by the white vampires and she in turn “fed off” or sucked their culture using her position as an honorary member to cause chaos from within. The chows also do this. I mean Bo owns the store on the “black” side of the street and Wendy owns the one on the “white” side. They are able to cross freely since they are colored and have received oppression as well, I mean Asians historically filled cotton picking positions as slaves we’re emancipated, as there weren’t a lot of incomes available. They were accepted and Wendy ultimately let the entire league of vampires in. Remmeck literally sweet talks her in her tongue. Just as the white government gave them their own segregated schools, which is represented by saying they’d change her daughter. This could be argued that they told Asian Americans that if they didn’t put their children in their own segregated schools, their culture would be ridiculed for difference or that their children would cave to the cultures of other schoolmates due to their different racial backgrounds. Ultimately, because Wendy is neither black nor white and she doesn’t face either extreme, she lets them in.  Now for the symbolism and metaphors and double entendres, etc. I’m gonna start with the cinematography. The juke joint music scene is so so so well done. So many Texas switches. So so so good. It follows each character throughout this sequence, showing us all of their ancestry. And the first shot we get of the twins. The juke joint is only on half of the background. Smoke is infront of it and stack isn’t. This was a great foreshadowing of their fates. Remmeck also FALLS into frame, signifying hes a fallen angel or has fallen into this fate of being a vampire and leeching off others. In this same shot we see crows or some sort of bird circling above the klan members house, foreshadowing that they may as well be dead with the arrival of remmeck. Also just the cigarette passing scene and how that’s the most difficult shot in the film. That just puts things into perspective because there are so many amazing shots and this simple seeming mechanical technique took so much aligning and so many takes.  Now for the symbolism and double meanings. Starting with the snake. With the Christian motifs this film contains, I’m guessing this is a reference to genesis. The snake represents temptation and sin. Smoke resists this as a contrast to his brother throughout the film. Smoke is serious about making an income through opening night. He stays business all night and doesn’t have any intimacies like his brother, which led to stacks demise. Speaking of how stack had his demise, the snake also represents how Mary snuck or slithered her way in back into their community. The snake also bled out because it was punctured in the neck, just like stack. I liked the music theme throughout too, and how it can be used by anyone, for better or for worse. This may be a reach but I think the disc of the guitar killing remmeck shows the modernization of music throughout time.  All in all I just loved this movie. Genius!!