By There are few theater-wide reactions more unifying than an auditorium of squinting, face-palming attendees thinking “what is this fucking bitch doing?” Rose doesn’t make room for Jack on the Titanic’s debris. Why is an unconscious Princess Leia using the force to rocket herself through space? Horror has staked its reputation on eliciting the loudest possible screeches of “what the fuck are you doing?!” at its female characters. In the spring of 2025, Li Jun Li joined this hallowed pantheon in Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS as Grace, the Chinese shopkeeper turned burn-it-all-down anarchist who shifts the fates of the innocents in Clarksdale, Mississippi. When her husband is turned into a vampire—his monstrously placid visage taunting her in the makeshift parking lot—Grace plugs her ears from the surrounding horde’s whispery song of “Pick Poor Robin Clean” and makes a break for a knife on the bar. Smoke and his ex-lover have to hold her back as she screams for them to let her go, belting “We’ll kill all of them!” Smoke covers her mouth. She bites his palm to free her voice and screams “Come on in, you motherfuckers!” to a vulturous crowd of vampires readying their fangs for the long-awaited invitation. Because the hero of the film is played by Michael B. Jordan, we think the gang has a fighting chance, but no one is spared.
I’ve seen the film three times in cinemas: not once has Grace’s group sacrifice passed without murmurs from the audience.
It’s impossible to truly decipher an audience-wide groan, especially when those same audiences exit the auditorium positively buzzing about what they’ve just seen, but the consensus I’ve gathered is that people find Grace’s decision to be illogical. “Dumb,” one who has been solely trained by the tropes of streamer-produced television may think.
Reality increasingly becomes an accoutrement that informs the life lived in our screens; what remains of the American mind, powered by processed cheese and part-time wages so low that bloodlust becomes the moderate state of being, is a subsidy for a sedentary, digital existence. Footage of the most visceral bloodshed ever documented is scrutinized through a CinemaSins lens by people who feign expertise or, as is increasingly popular, through a proud ignorance of expertise. Jonathan Ross caps Renee Good in the arm twice and then a third time through her temple with the service firearm in his right hand. In his left is an iPhone he’s using to record her to slot her identity into an internal database of domestic terrorists. As her bleeding body lurched on the steering wheel and her coasting Honda Pilot slammed into a parked neighbor’s car, Ross records himself calling her a “fucking bitch” while the body’s warm. Legions of worms review the tape and still try to call it self-defense. I understand why Renee Good stopped her car in the middle of the street, I understand why Alex Pretti put his body between that of a bullish I.C.E. agent and the woman he was assaulting, and because I intrinsically understand those, I understood why Grace Chow from SINNERS launched herself against a formidable network of bloodsucking world-destroyers. The “fucking bitch” transcends mediums.
SINNERS is a peculiar miracle of a film. None of its components are fully functional. It’s horror sans dread, parable minus a coherent central metaphor, erotic but all over the pants, about the flat breadth of time itself but so linear that you feel every ticking minute of the runtime. SINNERS isn’t all the way there, and yet, here it is. The film glues together three dozen half-sputtered, incomplete sentences and forges them as thematic complexity, but in this haphazardness is an electric delight in consuming a direct adaptation of a madly scribbled notepad’s overzealous, immature, far-reaching, sneakily revelatory, hyper, chaotic, and incredibly human thoughts. It’s a movie that jumped directly from mind to screen. I cannot believe this got made, nor can I be convinced any one of us—including the film’s authors—are able to make heads or tails over what the fuck the movie is trying to say: my note-taking slowed down round the 45th minute of watching the twins run errands, the pen went back in my pocket the moment I saw a gang of Klan-adjacent vamps do an Irish jig, and everything sort of just came to a halt when you realize the movie that features a dozen blown-to-smithereens white boys is simultaneously validating the idea that Black culture attracts demons, vices, and *shudders* immigrants.
Coogler, author of some of modern American cinema’s most revolting fiction, is undeserving of charitableness, but he is plucking so generously from the quintessential 90s Black genre canon that SINNERS feels more of that era than any wink-wink homage could ever dream of. Visions of Bill Duke, the Hughes Brothers, John Singleton, and Ernest Dickerson, referenced like De Palma interpolated Hitch. This is how you cement the culture. It’s moviemaking so expressive that I nearly let Coogler off the hook for his decade of misdeeds, and even when the film itself falters, the grievances melt away when you’re watching a sequence like the one where the dice cheater is getting kicked in unison with Pearline’s stomping while we’re crosscutting with Stack drinking Mary’s spit, Bo shutting the windows from bar access, and Smoke working out with Slim where the fuck Cornbread went before walking in on his mutilated twin. It’s a movie so disarmingly across-the-board “good” that it stunned American audiences, but the film wasn’t solely a precursory cultural event. It didn’t drop, fall off, and then get picked back up around awards season. Since mid-April, SINNERS has remained in the corner of every room. It lingers like an angel—or a demon—even still, its sentiments feeding from and informing the year of many crossroads it spawned into. SINNERS came out right before our worlds started changing, and I mean the type of changing we felt from February 2020 to March.
—
I knew shit was popping off in the late spring when I was at an 8th grade Catholic school graduation in Winnetka. The pew directly in front of me saw an iPhone changing hands between relatives of the valedictorian. There was an infographic sent in the group chat of the Mexican father in front of me, the phone passed down the row to his Filipino wife and in-laws. I peered over and saw the same graphic I’d glimpsed on my own an hour earlier. Federal agents were said to be storming other graduation ceremonies, and the Fashion District, too. La Migra is no new threat, but this was the dawn of mass arrests dependent on fulfilling human quotas through “low-hanging fruit” of gardeners and Home Depot day laborers. Like the tariff logic, American hostility shifting from soft to hard power affects its own denizens first. Protests rang out. The city was quick to decry the presence of I.C.E., but it didn’t stop the LAPD’s ghetto birds from burning fuel across the county, armed feds using public parks and roadways as staging for their barely strategized shows of force, and much of the violence in those weeks stemming from hothead police officers terrorizing our streets. The pigs were bull-rushing crowds of teenagers, their snipers lined along the DTLA high-rises, and front-line psychos were attacking the press in record numbers. Folks showed out until they didn’t: a lot of people who would’ve wanted to pop out were dead tired of getting beat up. The stagnancy of western living resumed.
On July 4th, 2025, Donald Trump signed some bullshit into action, and in the same afternoon I was grilling a discounted $15 tray of 90% lean ground beef with some packaged sharp cheddar slices also on sale through the Kroger rewards program. Fireworks were popping off again in LA six months after wildfires threatened to spread into Hollywood Boulevard and evacuated hundreds of thousands (myself included). Medicaid was slashed and 4xtra lost his hand lighting M-80s. At 9:46 PM, an 8-year-old girl in Buena Park was blown up by a cache of fireworks lit by a single misfired rocket on her street. The Big Bear bald eagles were not found in their nest. Is it hubris? Is it negligence? Do people truly not know any better, or is the inquisition of our futures so crystal clear that it doesn’t feel like there’s anything to restore anymore? On that Independence Day, I questioned local characters’ stupid decision-making as fireworks shot off in the same near distance I overlooked a January blaze decimating Altadena. I retract my complaints of any dumb character decisions in any fiction.
It’s been a nasty, disgusting decade, the type of epoch where anyone opting for blithe optimism should be best met with a metal bat to the temporal bone. Sometimes you let the birds chirp, but sometimes—and it’s not pretty nor particularly nice—you’ve got to greet their screeching with BB pellets. The U.S. government’s commitment to “energy dominance” has ushered in plain colonialist expansionism: there’s a frankness to the resource seizures of Greenland, Venezuela, and Gaza that reframes Cheney and Bush’s bread and circuses as signs of respect to their constituency. At least those guys put on a show to enshroud the crimes. I.C.E. is a direct military wing of the rabidly nationalistic U.S. government—now free to run rampant at the decree of Donald J. Trump—but what else is the American police force than a self-ordained paramilitary of the conservative project? Culturally, Nick Fuentes and the GOP normalized white supremacy, so now the goalpost shifts to an open-arms embrace of pedophilia. They keep telling me I’m supposed to trust “some” cops at the very least, but if we’re judging cops against immigrants, beating your wife is an exponentially graver crime than overstaying a visa (read: a “crime” I could not give less of a shit about). I progressively have to tell more and more people to fuck off like they’re telemarketers. Everyone facepalms when the Chinese shopkeeper picks a fight, but we’ve surrendered the standards for our national output so wholly that no one even blinked at the fact that HBO Max lets you pick the KKK couple as your profile avatar.
2025 was a slow-ticking death march. Day after day—and on some days, hour after hour—it was spent wondering when it was all gonna burst. In its patient first act, SINNERS keeps you asking when the top is going to blow off this joint. There’s so much set-up that the vampire film intentionally keeps you waiting for the vampires, and in the film’s great self-immolating magic trick, by the time Remmick turns the crowd of sharecroppers into a buffet, you start resenting that a gorgeous portrait of the ecstatic blend of this local culture has been hijacked by a supernatural siege thriller. We’re barely a twelfth of the way into 2026, and, look around: someone opened the barn doors. Even after all that’s been done, many still may await one huge blast, a definitive sign that things have actually changed for good. But there is no one big bomb. Every day, thousands of people’s bombs go off, hundreds in your own communities. In SINNERS, most of the Juke’s deaths will go unsolved, but every vampiric turning is its own rippling disaster. Friends, mothers, brothers, sisters, and fathers, all tracelessly turned to ash. You cannot wait for the big bomb.
Be the Nuremberg Trial you want to see in this world because the establishment has not helped us. It’s when California Senator Alex Padilla was thrashed by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s goons that Mayor Karen Bass raised her voice an octave. Fast-forward, and as thousands of Minnesotans take to the streets during a historic snowstorm, Governor Tim Walz is on his third sternly worded letter to the Trump administration and Mayor Jacob Frey fits in enough “I do not support abolishing I.C.E.”s to offset his tough-guy “Get the fuck out”s. What Democratic allyship we receive is wholly transactional—i.e. World Cup, Olympics, electability in 2028. I.C.E. is a problem for the Democratic Party’s professional prospects, not a constitutional crisis. Karen Bass panicking over the possibility of rescinded federal funding for the Olympics, spending her curfew announcements lamenting the property damage of an Apple Store; Gavin Newsom is taking this all in to entertain a failed presidential bid. Every state has its ruling clowns, but California’s make enough noise that they become global figures. Our culture opposes Arab-Muslims and trans people with such vitriol, yet when a militarized wing of a tyrannical elite occupies our city streets like so many militia fanatics have fantasized over, even our elected officials can’t muster more than “hey! you can’t—you’re not—you shouldn’t do that!” Our electeds do not protect us, and at this critical junction, it is key to understand that if this isn’t where the line is drawn, then we will never be protected. The Democrats can only be so vocal about occupied Minneapolis because Kamala Harris just 14 months ago was hinging a presidential run on draconian immigration crackdowns—door-to-door service, but with a smile. To harp on voting at a time like this? Face the goddamn wall, too.
—
Not only was January 6th funny, it worked. It was an extortionate show of force that tipped icy Democrats towards nakedly vouching for rightwing policies, lest they be threatened again—to some of the more braindead policymakers (cue John Fetterman, between grunts of support for Israeli apartheid and lamentably unfulfilled sessions of suicidal ideation, shambling about the halls of Congress like Mr. X in HOKA’s) the Capitol riot served as a legitimate illumination of the voting body’s displeasure. As normie Liberals begin to call for the trials and subsequent hangings of the American gestapo, the Democratic Party’s central talking point is that federal agents require more training. Jesus Christ, man. Lawmakers across the entire political spectrum twiddled their thumbs as I.C.E. imprisoned naturalized citizens for the crime of advocating for Palestine. Chuck Schumer’s brazen inactivity was a practical endorsement of Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation: these fucking losers lost the lead on I.C.E. long ago. Citizens are doing what our city officials should. Blocking roads, immobilizing unmarked vans, literally running this scum out of our parks and businesses… That’s within our power. Last summer, the Los Angeles Police Department tear gassed protestors and stood by idly as our neighbors were abducted. The boys in blue look upon the escalating nationwide tactics with glee, vindicated by the establishing precedents that they too can enforce in the coming decade. The United States prides its citizenry on one day having to pull the trigger on a man in uniform from overseas. As the cinema often teaches us, perhaps the truer answer arises when we look inwards.
It’s easy to tough-talk on the Internet, but it is true that anything short of barbaric retaliatory violence is pageantry. We’re faced off against multiple armies of state-funded commando gangsters—not to mention the actual U.S. Army—who, I promise you, have chosen capital over the well-being of their fellow man: low morale may boost suicide rates, and from most accounts, the protesting is cratering the spirits of federal agents, but those numbers are too quaint for my liking. I need growth. There’s only so much power in a cardboard sign, call me when someone brings out Officer So-and-So’s son to the frontline of a protest so the brat can be eaten whole in “Berserk” demon fashion.
SINNERS is filled with these sorts of savage splash panels, Coogler’s manga influences imbuing the work in ways beyond an AKIRA motorcycle slide, but he rarely lets victory ring. The stunning dolly-out of the burnt barn as the juke joint’s inhabitants dance in the open air lands on a gang of white supremacist vampires staring upon them like a honey-baked ham; the aspect-ratio-shifting hero shot of the armed survivors ready to fend off an army of the damned is immediately undercut by Remmick swatting away Grace’s molotov cocktail. Despite its blockbuster status, SINNERS is a mean old time at the movies, and its ruthlessness is grounded in material reality. For American minorities, death has rarely been a quiet mercy, with generations ran through kangaroo courts and the survivors enslaved by executioners. In one of his seldom sober moments, Delta Slim recounts the lynching and castration of his fellow convict and compatriot by the Ku Klux Klan; later, in one of the more difficult images of the film, he heroically stages a distraction by dragging a broken beer bottle over his forearms and feeding himself to his now undead Black brethren. Coogler made a Trumpian blockbuster, one that both mourns and revels in a multicultural morass of death, and the pitch-black poetry that arises when billions of threads of international history intersect. It’s a chamber piece that reverberates like an intergalactic event.
Why is this Irishman suddenly a specter of all-consuming death? Same reason a bunch of SoCal Mexicans-Americans naively voted Trump despite Sheinbaum putting up record approval ratings with their native kin—those who believe they’ll be the next to be accommodatingly ingratiated into North American whiteness are destined to be swallowed whole by that beast. None of this makes sense, but it’s violent and its roots are widespread. Why does Smoke and Stack’s juke joint have to open tonight of all nights? Why not tomorrow, or when they’ve settled in, or perhaps when they have sufficient time to prepare stock? Doesn’t matter. It’s this miraculous, naturally occurring amassment of the community. There’s this shaky axiom that life is short, but I think I disagree, which is a rich perspective at the sage old age of 29, but I know for a fact that pain is long-held and sorrow never brief. This I know is a widely felt truth, and why the ending of SINNERS—wherein Sammy is flush with the fear, anguish, and jubilation of the best day and worst night of his life (all torrenting through the marvelous folds of Buddy Guy’s face)—works in any capacity, despite Coogler’s outfit choices. The wrong takeaway of the COVID-19 pandemic is that we all got over it—the truth is that it’s barely been processed (the double truth is that we’re still in it) and that these daily terrors are shaping new ids we never knew ourselves or one another capable of. Joy is still possible, and it can even persist, but the generational carnage of this time is already being felt before most of us have fertilized the eggs of the next.
Did Grace really even have to say “come on in” out loud? They’re in. Alex Karp and Peter Thiel are overseeing the overhaul of the tech sector so it can shift to innovations for state surveillance. Microsoft’s primary cloud-computing service, Azure, was used by the IDF to collect Palestinian phone calls (in September 2025, Microsoft cut off some of the services after a vocal quarter of BDS boycotts). TikTok’s acquisition by Oracle has domesticated the data seizure of your sexual preferences, our daily conservatorship by despots permitted by a misled user base. Again, I must repeat, they’ve come in without any of us even having to say a word. If the vampires eternally wait out your last stand by eviscerating your daughter in her bedroom, then you might as well burn the whole thing down. Likewise, if the most menial forms of resistance get you labeled as a domestic terrorist, you might as well take the title in stride; if even just opening a venue for the locals sets you up for the butcher block, you might as well keep that trunk in the back of your Patterson-Greenfield automobile. They will come in. They’ve heard the incantations of our song, smelled the aromas of our frying oil, gazed at the tenacious legacy of our flame. They’re not leaving without bodies. Smoke accepts death so long as he gets to mow down every last one of Hogwood’s buttfuckers on the way out. That’s not me talking, that’s the most Oscar-nominated film ever made popping off—it’s not exactly the minority position no more.
Direct your resources to:
The Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota
Minneapolis Charity Megathread
The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights
California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation
Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance
California Rapid Response Networks
Tap into your local community for direct fundraisers: always be wary of your sources, and make sure that money goes where it needs to go. Weigh the safety of yourself and your loved ones and consider watch-dogging & monitoring the streets yourself.
Comments