Here come the vamps. Photo: Warner Bros./Everett Collection
Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of Sinners.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners ends at its beginning: in the film’s first scene, we witness a young man named Sammie (Miles Caton) driving up to a small churchhouse in the middle of rural Mississippi in 1932. He’s bloodied and injured, with deep gashes along his cheek, carrying the neck of a guitar. His father, the pastor of this church, embraces his son, begging him to drop the guitar and turn away from music. In the next scene, Coogler takes us back in time to the morning before, with Sammie’s twin cousins Smoke and Stack (Michael B. Jordan, pulling double duty) returning from Chicago with a small bit of money earned from less-than-legal dealings with Al Capone. They intend to open a juke joint where their gifted blues musician cousin might be able to sing a song or two. It’s a nice idea, with both brothers eager to mend old wounds from the last time they were home.
But just as the sun sets and the jazz begins, vampires swarm the place. A dance party turns into a full-blown massacre: Stack and his old fling Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) get turned into vampires, Smoke and his estranged wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku) die from their wounds, and several other friends and loved ones go in the process. When Sammie returns to his father’s church the next morning (the whole film takes place over roughly 24 hours), he’s the only man still standing from the previous night. Well… until the credits roll, when the first of two post-credits sequences recontextualizes that ending and much of what we saw in the two hours prior.
After the first fade to black, Coogler takes us about sixty years into the future, to Chicago in 1992. Jazz legend George “Buddy” Guy — playing older Sammie, though he’s credited on IMDb as “Jazz Musician,” which implies that Guy maybe fought vampires in his youth — plucks away at a guitar in a bar. As the night winds down, two visitors pop by: Stack and Mary, dressed in lavish, colorful ’90s clothing. It turns out neither perished that night in the speakeasy — Mary got away before dawn and Stack struck a deal with his brother. Rather than kill his undead twin, Smoke instead told Stack he’d let him get away so long as he let Sammie live a full life. Though this seemingly goes against what Irish vampire gang leader Remmick (Jack O’Connell) tells Smoke — that the vampires have a kind of democratic socialist thing going on where they don’t splinter into factions — it seems as though Stack forgoes the group to honor Smoke, who he still loves, and his lingering fondness for his little cousin.
With his side of the bargain now met, Stack has come to see Sammie play one last time before drifting back into the Only Lovers Left Alive-type of lifestyle — aka looking cool, hanging out, and listening to live music, as one might assume a chill vampire would do if they had all of eternity ahead of them — he and Mary have taken up in their decades of vampiredom. They offer Sammie the immortality they’ve grown to cherish, but he refuses. He tells his cousin that up until the violence started, that night at the juke joint was the greatest of his life. Stack agrees: it’s the last time he saw his brother.
In the final post-credits scene, we see Sammie as a young man again, singing and playing “This Little Light of Mine” on the guitar we last saw smashed to bits after that violent night at the juke joint. As the prologue of the film explains, there are musicians whose skill can heal communities but also summon evil: we know that Sammie is one such musician. It’s a nice to see Caton playing and singing again, his debut role a remarkable introduction to this young actor. But the scene itself could be read as a little ambiguous, too: is Sammie trying to pierce the veil again, playing a song that could both foster community but also bring back the vampires? Is it just another showcase for Caton in his first feature? Who might be waiting on the threshold of his father’s church when the song is over? We don’t see what comes next — but Sammie does.
