Here are the Vamps.
Photo: Warner Bros./everett collection
Spoilers to come for the intrigue and the end of Sinners.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners Ends at his beginning: in the first scene of the film, we witness a young man named Sammie (Miles Caton) heading towards a small church house in the middle of the rural Mississippi in 1932. He is bloody and injured, with deep cuts along his cheek, carrying the neck of a guitar. His father, the pastor of this church, kisses his son, begging him to drop the guitar and turn away from music. In the next scene, Coogler brings us back in the previous morning, with the twin cousins of Sammie Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan, drawing a double service) returning from Chicago with a little money earned from less than legal relationships with Al Capone. They intend to open a juke joint where their cousin musician of gifted blues could sing a song or two. It’s a good idea, the two brothers wishing to repair the old wounds of the last time they were at home.
But just when the sun sets and the jazz begins, the vampires swarm the place. A dancing evening turns into a full massacre: Stack and its former FLING Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) are transformed into vampires, smoke and her ex-wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) die from their injuries, and several other friends and relatives go in the process. When Sammie returns to the church of his father the next morning (the whole film takes place for about 24 hours), he is the only man still standing from the previous night. Well … until the credits roll, when the first of the two post-key sequences recontextualizes this end and a large part of what we saw in the previous two hours.
After Black’s first melted, Coogler takes us around sixty years in the future, in Chicago in 1992. The legend of Jazz George “Buddy” Guy – playing older Sammie, although he is credited on IMDB as “jazz musician”, which implies that this guy may have fought vampires in his youth – moving in a guitar. As the night ends, two visitors go through: Stack and Mary, dressed in sumptuous and colorful clothes of the 90s. It turns out that the two perished that night in the speakeasy – Mary fled before dawn and Stack concluded an agreement with her brother. Rather than killing his downside twin, Smoke rather told Stack that he would let him escape as long as he let Sammie live a full life. Although it apparently goes against what the head of the Irish vampire gangs Remmick (Jack O’Connell) says to smoke – that vampires have a kind of democratic socialist thing by happening where they do not put themselves in factions – it seems that Stack renounces the group to honor smoke, which he still loves, and his persistent slope for his little cousin.
With his side of the good deal now met, Stack came to see Sammie play one last time before going back to the Only lovers left aliveType of lifestyle – AKA looks cool, dragging and listening to live music, because we could assume that a cold vampire would make the case if he had all eternity before them – he and Mary took in their decades of Vampired. They offer Sammie the immortality they have grown up to cherish, but he refuses. He told his cousin that until the beginning of violence, that night at the Joint Juke was the greatest of his life. Stack agrees: this is the last time he saw his brother.
In the last post-writer scene, we see Sammie again as a young man, singing and playing “This Little Light of Mine” on the guitar that we have seen for the last time on songs after this violent night at the Joint Juke. As the prologue of the film explains, there are musicians whose skills can cure communities but also invoke evil: we know that Sammie is one of these musicians. It’s nice to see Cato play and sing again, his first role a remarkable introduction to this young actor. But the scene itself could also be read as a little ambiguous: does Sammie try to unravel the veil again, playing a song that could both promote the community but also bring the vampires? Is it just another showcase for Cato in his first feature film? Who could wait for the threshold of his father’s church when the song is over? We do not see what comes then – but Sammie does it.
