'Sinners' Celebrates the Decadent Intimacy of the Black South

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There is a decadent intimacy to the Black South. When I arrived in Greensboro, North Carolina, less than an hour away from where my first ancestors to the Americas toiled the land until they made it their own, those intimacies made themselves immediately known. There were no strangers; on the sacred land where I attended college and became the woman I was destined to be, we were enveloped in warm hugs, prayed over, pulled close to the bosom, and carried through both triumphs and storms. 

Those intimacies are in the shorthand dialect neighbors use with one another, in the sweet tea and the sour sorrows that seemingly move in tandem, in the courteousness that even shows itself during marches through the streets to protest injustice and demand freedom. There’s a familial connection among the Black folks who have—through destiny, fate, and pure ol’ luck—come to be on the same land at the same time. Those intimacies were even in the dark corners of the nightclubs we thrusted and grinded in, night after night, using our moving bodies to feel even a single semblance of freedom amid endless turmoil. 

The Black South is hallowed ground, that which deserves to be both revered and interrogated for the ways in which Black people’s blood, dedication, and sacrifice has been used to justify continuing indignities. There are few cultural touchpoints that have managed to capture the complexities, intimacies, and contradictions that make the Black South a magical portal for living and resisting: Eve’s Bayou (1997), Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016), The Color Purple (1985), Mississippi Burning (1988), Daughters of the Dust (1991), and now, against all odds, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025). 

On the surface, Sinners offers a simple story: Twin brothers Smoke and Stack, both amazingly played by Michael B. Jordan, return to Clarksdale, Mississippi, in the 1930s to use the monies they’ve earned (or stolen) in Chicago to open a juke joint. But between the opening and closing credits—there are two scenes during the end credits that audiences should remain seated for—there are layers upon layers upon layers of Black southern intimacy to unpack.

There is a growing vampire clan led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell), an Irish immigrant to the Americas who wants to use Black peoples’ music to lower the veil between life and death and reconnect him with the ancestors he’s long ago lost. There’s a renegade preacher’s son who is pulled between his father’s desire for him to carry on their religious tradition and his own desire to use secular music—the blues—to free himself from sharecropping and a limited view of his possibilities. There are twin brothers as different as different can be who have returned home to Mississippi, “the devil they know,” to attempt to clean their blood money and offer Black folks a reprieve at the same time. There is conjuring. There is anti-Black racism. There is joy and freedom and pleasure. There is a commitment to using film as an artform to capture the nuances between glances, between words, and between times that make a life worth living.

There are a few scenes in Sinners that have proven impossible for me to stop thinking about, but there is one in particular that captures the intimacies that have become a signature of Coogler’s films. As Smoke and Stack prepare to open Club Juke on the same night they purchase the building it will be housed in, they separate to run errands and get all the manpower and supplies they’ll need to make opening night a success. Smoke’s primary goal soon becomes clear: As he walks up toward a small house made of uneven wood, he removes his hat and places flowers on an unmarked though adorned burial place. “Papa’s here,” he says quietly before Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), the love he left behind seven years ago, walks up behind him. He knows she is there before she ever utters a single word.

Annie, the film’s magic woman, is a conjurer. Annie is a hoodoo worker, a medicine woman, and love is her most potent ingredient. Though they have been apart for seven years, there is still so much love, tension, and grief between Annie and Smoke. They have loved. They have lost their child. And yet, they have remained tied, mostly through the mojo bag Annie gifted Smoke either before he went to war or before he departed for Chicago. 

“Mojo bags, (originally called gris gris bags by African Islamic cultures) are essentially amulets that provide protection, healing, and communication with spirits for the wearer,” explains Geentel & Bard, a family-owned company in South Carolina that offers walking tours. “They originated in Central and West Africa and came to America with the rise of slavery in the South.”

Imagine how much love Annie poured into this mojo bag to try to protect her love across time, across oceans, across space, across lifetimes. Though Smoke claims not to believe in the power of her hoodoo, he still wears the mojo bag. When he attempts to tell Annie he’s been saved not by her magic but by his association with wealthy, powerful men, she responds simply: “You fool. How you know I ain’t prayed and used every root my grandma gave me to keep you and your brother safe?” 

There is a shorthanded intimacy between Annie and Smoke that radiates onscreen. When he tells her, “It still hurts coming back here. But I miss you. And I love you,” the hurt itself sizzles between them. So too does the desire as Annie grips Smoke by the throat, grabs his crotch, and tells him “your body hasn’t forgotten me” before they proceed to have sex that is raw and rife with longing. They can’t forget one another; their love is like sinew in their DNA. 

Love is a conjurer. Like music, love can conjure spirits from the past and the future and bring entire ancestral lines together. The love between Annie and Smoke—as well as the love between Smoke and Stack, brothers who have endured all the slights of the world together, are essential to telling the story of Sinners. Smoke and Stack love one another enough to survive—wars, loss, vampires, and even white supremacy—without a single complaint. 

Smoke is more self-composed; he thinks of every single detail from how much profit they’ll need to generate at Club Juke to prevent the brothers from going broke to how to ward off the vampires that show up at their juke joint’s front door. When their father was mercilessly abusing Stack, Smoke intervened and killed their father. The murder is not a wedge between the brothers; instead, it brought them closer. When they had to flee Clarksdale, Smoke relocated the brothers to Mount Bayou, a town founded by free people with all Black-owned businesses. He is seemingly the mastermind that keeps them both safe and moving forward.

Stack is more fun-loving and freewheeling. He is led by his whims and his desires because he knows he has a brother who has his back. When Smoke tries to encourage him to hold off on opening Club Juke, Stack looks up at the clear blue sky and responds simply: “It is a mighty fine day to be free.” His continued quest for freedom—in whatever form it comes—is his single guiding light. And yet, despite their differences, when the brothers separate, for a moment or a lifetime, they constantly tell one another “I love you” before embracing. 

That commitment to intimacy—love as one of many driving forces—runs through all of Coogler’s projects: Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) and his mother (Octavia Spencer) in Fruitvale Station (2013); Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) and Bianca (Tessa Thompson) in Creed (2015); T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o) in Black Panther (2018); and even Shuri (Leticia Wright) and Namor (Tenoch Huerta) in Black Panther: World of Wakanda (2022). Coogler seemingly understands that love bonds us across time, across generations, and across space. It is that which is universal, even if there are cultural nuances in how we express and come to understand love. 

Even within the juke joint itself, as Black people—many of whom are sharecroppers on plantations throughout Mississippi—come to let loose with liquor, dancing, gambling, and just having themselves a good ol’ time, the love flows. When Smoke expresses discontent about customers paying for drinks with coins that are only recognized at plantation general stores, Annie and Stack ward him off by saying “Let them enjoy themselves. This place has to belong to them.”

The juke joint is a symbol of freedom. In The Color Purple, both the original (1985) and the musical remake (2023), when Harpo opens the juke joint and welcomes Shug Avery to perform, she uses that performance space to pour life into Celie and remind her of who she is. “Miss Celie’s Blues (Sister)” is as life-giving and transformative as the future-tripping “I Lied to You” performed by Preacher Boy (Miles Caton) in Sinners. Without the worries of everyday life, the blues, which Delta Slim (Delroy Lindo) reminds us in Sinners, is a magic Black people brought with us and can’t be taken away, becomes a means of grounding us in the present and thrusting us into the future. 

By the end of the night, most of the Black folks in the juke joint will be turned into vampires, including Annie, who not only recognizes that they are dealing with vampires but also makes Smoke promise to kill her if she is bitten. But for one night—one spiritually stirring night—all those Black folks are free. It is that eternal quest for freedom, even that which is time-limited and impeded by white supremacy, by capitalism, by folkloric vampires, that drives Sinners and that drives the intimacy that connects Black people in the South and across the diaspora.  

In the first of two end credit scenes, we learn that Sammie, better known as Preacher Boy, becomes a world-renowned blues musician. We learn that Stack, who was turned into a vampire, survived that torturous night and is now perpetually walking the Earth without Smoke. And we learn that both still dream of that time in Clarksdale, Mississippi, where opening a juke joint was their sole motivation. Before the vampires came, it was the best day of their respective lives. Stack tells Sammie: “For a few hours, we were free.” And that—as Sinners so perfectly captures—is what it is to be Black: to find pieces of freedom within a world intent on hurting us and chipping away at our dignity. To be free. To be free. To be free.

This piece was edited by Nicole Froio and copy edited by Chrissy Stroop.

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