Living within the Frame

A critique of the movie, Sinners

When I first saw Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, I was thrilled. Here was a modern, vibrant film made by a Black filmmaker, brimming with style and confidence. I admired it. I felt its freshness. And yet, I also knew I had to critique it. Loving Black art has never meant silencing discomfort. It has meant holding space for the art, the development of the artist, for contradictions, and demanding more than surface representation.

I carried this same feeling into both Black Panther films. I understood their global resonance and enjoyed their spectacle. But I wasn’t fully taken in. A dazzling surface can obscure deeper questions. Representation can become the goal. But it should be a doorway to deeper change. Critique, for me, is a form of care. It resists a desire to romanticise visibility. Critique insists that our standards match the breadth of our imaginations.

With that in mind, I turn to Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. Released in 2025, the film is set in 1930s Clarkesdale, Mississippi. It blends horror, Hoodoo, Southern gothic textures, and the diverse layers of Black music. It is ambitious, visually striking, and charged with emotion. It carries contradictions we live with today. These lie at the heart of Black cultural life.

Sinners leans on tropes we recognise. The banjo, an instrument with African origins, is re-coded as a symbol of white menace. Indigenous vampire hunters arrive with force and vanish without explanation. Irish vampires stand in for exploitative whiteness, flattening history into caricature. These choices create atmosphere, but they collapse into shorthand. The sets and images are lush. Yet the symbols shrink into signs, not full stories.

The poet Mari Evans once said, “We must know what has been taken, and what we carry.” Misaligned cultural memory, even with the best intentions, representation risks becoming misrepresentation. Films that use culture as shorthand dazzle the eye. But they risk teaching, or reinforcing, the wrong lesson.

Not a low-budget production of the 1970s, Sinners inherits the logic of Blaxploitation. Violence suggests a type of catharsis. Supernatural victories stand in for structural change. Stylised suffering replaces systemic critique. bell hooks reminded us that representation is never innocent. Angela Davis warned us not to mistake vengeance for justice. Walter Rodney showed that exploitation is not a person, but a process. In Sinners, the monsters distract us from the systems that made them possible.

Coogler’s film wants to carry history and imagination at once. But spectacle overwhelms critique. It asks us to marvel when we might be better served by wrestling.

Women, Colour, and Cultural Authority

The film’s most compelling cultural work rests on its women, though their roles are uneven. Annie, played by Wunmi Mosaku, is the spiritual centre. A Hoodoo practitioner, she embodies grief and resilience. As a dark-skinned woman, Annie resists cinema’s erasure. Yet her authority is tested, especially by her ex-husband, Smoke. Annie holds dignity and ancestral knowledge. But the narrative frames her through scepticism and relational struggle.

Mary, played by Hailee Steinfeld, represents another facet of Black womanhood. She is light-skinned, mixed-race, and positioned ambiguously in the community. She shapes the plot, but her role is weighted differently. Where Annie’s faith is doubted, Mary is cast as mediator, bridge, and sometimes love interest. Her role shows how colourism shapes the stories we see on screen. Proximity to whiteness grants her mobility. Annie, darker and rooted in tradition, is constrained.

Together, Annie and Mary embody the contradictions of Black female representation. Both integral. Both compromised. Annie carries ancestral practice. Mary embodies ambivalence and mediation. Neither receives the interiority that Lorraine Hansberry argued was essential to realism.

Sammie, the young cousin played by Miles Caton, adds an element to the dynamic established by the women’s roles. This creates a powerful trio. His blues singing provides the film’s sonic core. Through his songs, the community’s grief and history rise. The ancestors feel close. Young Sammie represents youth, artistry, and the blues as survival testimony. A survival testimony articulated through the presence of Sammie as elder, played by Buddy Guy. Yet Sammie’s role remains symbolic, seated on the myth of Robert Johnson at the crossroads. More atmosphere than character.

In Annie, Mary, and Sammie, we see spirit, complexion, and sound woven into the film’s fabric. Sinners has a sense of cultural depth. Yet, the uneven treatment of their characters limit their narrative voice. Annie revered but contained. Mary visible but ambiguous. Sammie vital yet underwritten.

The film also gestures outward. Coogler brings Indigenous, Irish, and Asian characters into its world. Still, these roles flatten history instead of deepening it. The Indigenous hunters are fierce but voiceless, a brief appearance before disappearing. The Irish vampire embodies colonial exploitation. And, reduces centuries of complexity to a single monstrous type. Asian figures linger at the margins. Silent intermediaries. Signalling empire without speaking. These characters broaden the allegory but fail to enrich it. Their presence shows how filmmakers can invoke global histories. But they fail to honour them with depth.

Lorraine Hansberry believed realism could be radical. In A Raisin in the Sun, she gave us characters bound by housing, class, gender, and hope – messy, contradictory, human. “All art is ultimately social,” she wrote, “that which agitates and that which prepares the mind for slumber.” Sinners entertains, but does it awaken? Its allegory risks lulling us with spectacle disguised as critique. Hansberry might have asked: Where is the everyday? Where is the struggle that resists myth? Where is the dignity in contradiction, not stylised heroism?

Martin Luther King Jr. might have asked similar questions. He believed justice must be rooted in dignity and moral clarity. He might have admired the ambition of Sinners. But he would have resisted its reliance on violence. “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence,” he warned. Would he see this film preparing us for freedom? Or distracting us with monsters?

At the box office, Sinners triumphed. It grossed hundreds of millions worldwide and drew critical acclaim. Yet industry voices treated Ryan Coogler’s leadership as a gamble. A type of scrutiny white directors rarely face. Black-led projects are often celebrated and doubted in the same breath.

But what does success mean under capitalism? Nelson George, in The Death of Rhythm and Blues, examines the absorption of cultural forms. Forms that are then repackaged, and sold back to us as prestige. Even Beyoncé, one of the world’s most successful artists, is not immune to these dynamics. Sinners thrives in that tension. Its brilliance stands out. Its compromises glare back at us.

The film gestures toward magical realism, but it rarely lands. Its supernatural flourishes strike the eye. But they disconnect from the story’s emotional logic. I longed for the depth of García Márquez. For the tenderness of Alice Walker. For the vision of Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust, where magic reveals truth instead of decorating it. In Sinners, the supernatural dazzles. But it rarely transforms.

For me, critique is not dismissal. It is a way of listening differently. A way of widening the conversation. Like She’s Gotta Have It and Black Panther, Sinners leaves me with questions: What are we being asked to feel? And what are we being asked to accept? How many ways can this be repackaged? And, for how long?

I want more from our stories. Not less magic, but more truth. Not just beauty, but radical imagination. I want us to be free, not merely seen.

Mari Evans said: “I want my people to see themselves in power, in truth, in possibility.” That remains my hope.