Sinners (2025)
Release date: 18 April 2025 (UK)
Director: Ryan Coogler
In Sinners, Ryan Coogler delivers more than a supernatural horror movie, he crafts a powerful decolonial statement on authorship, cultural survival, and the violent commodification of Black creativity. The film, set in the 1930s in Mississippi, follows the Smokestack Twines, Smoke and Stack, both played by Michael B. Jordan, creating a juke joint built with ambition, sweat, betrayal, and unspoken actions of the past. But beyond its vampiric metaphors and richly textured visuals lies a deeper confrontation with the colonial legacies still haunting contemporary storytelling.
From the opening frames, Sinners reveals the impact of Jim Crow’s racial apartheid in contrast to the deep traditions of Black Southern spirituality, a living archive that represents resistance, religious syncretism, and ancestral power. The juke joint becomes more than a business, it becomes a contested space of joy, music, and survival.
Through a decolonial lens, the demons in Sinners are literal vampires, bloodthirsty figures who feed off Black talent, echoing the historical extraction of Black cultural labour by white institutions. Here, vampirism becomes a sharp metaphor for cultural appropriation, where Black brilliance is devoured for profit, with little regard for the cost to those creating it.
Colorism, class tensions, and cross-cultural interactions are all embedded in the story’s DNA. Decolonising cinema, in this context, is not simply about on-screen diversity. It is about reclaiming authorship, disrupting Western genre norms, and dismantling the colonial hierarchies that determine which stories matter and who gets to tell them. Coogler, like in Black Panther, defies the expectation that Black stories must conform to familiar tropes or palatable formats. Instead, he mobilises genre — horror, fantasy, and historical drama as tools of resistance. This hybridity is itself a decolonial act, resisting containment within Western cinematic conventions.
One of the film’s most compelling sequences is the musical number within the juke joint, which fuses kinetic camera work, blues music, and ecstatic Black joy. It’s a moment of cinematic liberation, where sound, body, and space merge outside the logic of the white gaze. Yet even this moment is under threat by the upcoming vampires. This moment represents a decolonial process of liberation through music and dance, it’s not only to survive but to thrive, to celebrate without being consumed.
In placing Sinners within a decolonial cinematic tradition, we recognise it as part of a growing body of work that seeks to unsettle the extractive practices of mainstream film. The resistance of the commodification of Black pain and joy, insisting instead on nuance, complexity, and autonomy. Sinners doesn’t just tell a story — it wrestles with history, critiques capitalism, and envisions a future where Black creativity is not just protected, but sovereign.
As audiences demand more from the stories they consume, Sinners serves as a reminder: decolonisation is not a metaphor. It is an active process — one that unfolds through narrative, aesthetic, and intention.
For more film recommendations, click here.