Sinners

"there are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true, it can pierce the veil between life and death." first we had robert pattinson's mickeys and now michael b. jordan's twins! 2025 is such a year for dual acting. i rarely see vampire movies done very well, so this is big for me. i loved almost everything, but the third act didn't quite make it for me, but that's alright. initially anticipated a run-of-the-mill horror story, but ryan coogler's work here is layered with SO MUCH historical subtext that i adored. loved watching the agonising struggle in every character whether to stay in or leave the juke, the familiarity of safety versus the temptation of freedom. especially in wunmi mosaku's annie, OH MY GOSH i loved her character and the stakes for her what with the sword of damocles of her child. definitely my favourite performance here. the antagonist, remmick, is amazing. jack o'connell makes him out to be charismatic, smooth-talking, and even downright funny at times, and yet is such a commanding villain every time he's onscreen. also the use of hitchcock's psycho instrumentals when introducing him to the audience for the first time is WILD i nearly shat myself. one of my favourite themes here is the use of vampirism and remmick's clan to symbolise how marginalised groups during the Jim Crow South years attempt to assimilate and achieve equality and freedom. remmick's irish roots are pretty prominent throughout the movie, and drawing on my american history lessons, african-americans and irish-americans bear many parallels in terms of shared struggles and oppression. however, rather than preserving their own culture, many irish-americans turned to join white american culture instead, leveraging their own whiteness as a form of social mobility. remmick, in this context, is a fascinating figure, serving as a colonised character turned coloniser himself. with him being cut off from his ancestors and craving, he craves to exploit sammie's transcendent musical gift to seize the freedom he could not find on his own. while my perspective may be shaped by my non-american background, i still find this theme particularly resonant. that’s all from me for now.