At the 2026 Golden Globe Awards, Sinners, directed by Ryan Coogler, won two major honors. It received the award for Cinematic and Box Office Achievement, acknowledging its broad commercial success, and Best Original Score. These recognitions matter because they signal that a film rooted in Black history, racial critique, and structural analysis can succeed without dilution. The score in particular functions as a narrative force, carrying historical memory and emotional weight that words alone could not sustain. Music becomes a way of transmitting meaning that bypasses rational defenses.

The racial undertones of the film Sinners are not subtle. They are foundational to what the film is doing, shaping not only its narrative but also how audiences are asked to read history, power, and responsibility. This clarity helps explain why the film resonated so widely across audiences while also generating less predictable backlash than one might expect from a story this racially pointed. I still remember the widespread push back from Spike Lee’s Film Malcolm X in the 1990s. Sinners does not announce its politics through speeches or slogans. Instead, it embeds them in horror, structure, character, and consequence, which requires viewers to do interpretive work rather than react defensively to explicit messaging. That demand for interpretation is itself a political choice that slows consumption and encourages reflection.

Coogler’s role as director is central to this achievement. His choices throughout the film are powerful and courageous, not because they are loud, but because they refuse compromise. He trusts the audience enough to let meaning accumulate rather than be explained. That trust is risky in a political and academic climate that often demands clarity without discomfort. Coogler’s confidence lies in knowing that the film does not need to persuade everyone in the same way to be effective. It needs only to be truthful to the historical and moral logic it presents.

Race, Power, and Survival Under Jim Crow

Set in the Jim Crow era American South, Sinners uses horror genre storytelling to examine how race, power, and survival operate in a society organized around extraction and exclusion. The rural setting is not mere backdrop. It actively shapes the choices available to the characters and the costs attached to those choices. Every interaction is filtered through a southern racial order that determines who is protected, who is disposable, and who must constantly calculate risk simply to remain alive. The film refuses to treat this order as accidental or outdated.

The film centers Black characters who are trying to start a Juke Joint (bar/club) in Clarksdale, Mississippi to build joy, autonomy, and community in a world that systematically denies them safety and ownership. Their aspirations are modest by any humane standard, yet they are treated as dangerous precisely because they assert humanity in a system designed to suppress it. This context matters because the film is not interested in individual morality divorced from structure. It is asking how Black and Brown morality functions when the system itself is immoral. That framing shifts responsibility away from individuals and toward institutions.

Rather than presenting oppression as an abstract force, the film shows how it operates through everyday constraints and power. Business, beer, movement, and even leisure are regulated by racial power in the Mississippi Delta. The main characters begin the film navigating rules that are unevenly enforced and selectively interpreted by local law enforcement and leaders. Survival requires vigilance, adaptability, and sometimes silence from the main characters Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore. That constant negotiation in the film is a form of labor in itself that rarely receives recognition.

By grounding its narrative in these realities, Sinners resists romanticizing resilience. Survival is not framed as virtue. It is framed as necessity. The film insists that Black and Brown endurance under oppression is not evidence of justice, but proof of how much injustice people are forced to absorb then and now. This distinction is crucial to understanding the film’s moral stance and its refusal to celebrate suffering.

Exploitation as a System Rather Than a Villain

One of the clearest racial undertones in Sinners is exploitation, presented not as the product of a single villain but as a vampiric system that sustains itself through routine harm. The dual antagonistic forces in the film are diffuse and persistent, functioning through local bias and inherited power rather than individual cruelty alone. This framing reflects historical reality more accurately than narratives that isolate evil in a few bad actors, it’s systemic. It also makes accountability harder to evade with a bad apple argument.

The horror elements amplify a long standing truth. Black communities create value, culture, and wealth, while others extract it. Music, labor, and social life become resources to be consumed rather than expressions of humanity to be respected. The supernatural aspects of the film do not replace history. They heighten it, making visible the violence that is often normalized or hidden in polite retellings of the past.

In this context, the title Sinners becomes deliberately unstable. The question is not who violates moral rules in the abstract. The question is who gets labeled immoral while others profit from the conditions that force transgression. Moral judgment becomes a tool of power rather than a measure of ethics. By refusing to simplify exploitation into personal failing of the Black characters, the film redirects responsibility where it belongs. It challenges viewers to recognize how systems operate to express. This insistence is uncomfortable, but it is also necessary for any honest engagement with racial history and its present consequences.

Co-optation and the Weaponization of Scarcity

A critical but often overlooked theme in Sinners is the way power co opts people of color into enforcing hierarchies against one another. The film shows how sabotaging access to safety, status, or survival is used as leverage. Certain characters are offered proximity to “protection” and “community” in exchange for complicity. These offers are framed as opportunities, but they function as traps designed to fracture collective resistance.

This dynamic reflects historical strategies used to fracture solidarity among oppressed groups. Scarcity is manufactured and then weaponized. When resources are intentionally limited, competition replaces collective resistance. Individuals are pressured to choose between personal survival and communal responsibility, even though the choice itself is imposed by an unjust system. The film exposes how this false choice severely distorts moral judgment.

By depicting these false choice dynamics without moralizing individual decisions, Sinners exposes the cruelty and horror of the system rather than condemning those caught within it. The film understands that coerced complicity is not necessarily consent. At the same time, it refuses to romanticize betrayal. It shows the cost of these choices not only to individuals, but to entire communities that lose the possibility of collective defense. I know I am not fully showing my hand with examples for this point but I don’t want to ruin the movie if you haven’t seen it. If you have, you understand what I am talking about here.

Double Consciousness and Fragile Spaces of Black Joy

Double consciousness operates throughout the film as both psychological burden and survival strategy. Black characters must navigate who they are privately versus how they must perform publicly. This negotiation is exhausting, but it is also necessary in a world where missteps carry disproportionate and deathly consequences. The juke joint, music, and nightlife scenes are central to this analysis. They are not decorative or nostalgic. They represent fragile spaces of freedom where Black joy, creativity, and connection can exist with allies, even if temporarily. These spaces allow characters to exhale, to experience themselves as whole rather than monitored.

The intrusion of violence by calling enemies into these spaces is one of the film’s most devastating moves. It mirrors historical patterns where Black autonomy has been repeatedly targeted, whether through surveillance, raids, or outright destruction. The message is that systems built on control cannot tolerate unsanctioned freedom.

Resistance and the Inevitability of Pushback

The film’s final act, particularly the blaze of glory confrontation with the Ku Klux Klan, is essential to its argument. This moment is not included for spectacle alone. It exists to make a clear political claim. Pushback is inevitable. When systems of terror operate openly, silence and accommodation cannot sustain life indefinitely. The horror and fear did not overwhelm the characters, they fought back furiously.

This confrontation rejects narratives that frame resistance as optional or extreme. The film insists that when violence is systemic, refusal becomes necessary. The cost of resistance is real and often devastating, but the cost of compliance is erasure. The ending does not romanticize violence, but it refuses to condemn resistance. It reframes resistance as moral clarity.

Coogler’s choice to end the film this way is both powerful and courageous. It denies viewers the comfort of ambiguity at the moment when stakes are highest. The message is not that resistance guarantees victory, but that it is the only path that preserves dignity. History moves not because oppression relents on its own, but because people refuse to absorb harm quietly.

This is where the film’s politics become unmistakable. Survival is not found in proximity to power. It is found in collective refusal to acquiesce. The blaze of glory is not about death. It is about drawing a line that cannot be crossed without consequence.

Why the Right Wing Has Largely Missed the Point

One of the most revealing responses to Sinners is the relative lack of extensive outrage from right wing commentators. This absence is not evidence of acceptance. I believe it is evidence of misrecognition or lack of recognition. The film does not present its critique in the language or symbols that typically trigger defensive backlash. It operates beneath familiar alarms.

Because the undertones are embedded rather than declared, viewers who are not attuned to racial history may interpret the film as generic horror or period drama. The critique passes beneath the surface of conventional culture war frameworks, similar to what we saw with Kendrick Lamar Super Bowl Halftime show. This allows the film to reach broader audiences without immediate dismissal. Subtlety in the art becomes strategy.

That misunderstanding is itself part of the film’s commentary. Power often fails to recognize critique unless it is explicit, because it does not expect to be questioned from within popular culture. Sinners exploits that blind spot. It speaks clearly to those who understand its language, while remaining opaque to those who do not.

What Sinners Ultimately Argues

In the end, Sinners is about who pays the price for America’s sins, who gets labeled immoral, and who is pressured into harming others to survive. It is about how systems maintain themselves through exploitation, co optation, and moral distortion. The horror is not confined to the supernatural. It is historical, structural, and ongoing. The film refuses to let audiences distance themselves from that reality.

Coogler’s direction ensures that none of this is accidental. His choices reflect confidence in the audience and commitment to truth. The film does not ask to be liked. It asks to be understood. That distinction matters in a culture that often confuses comfort with value. Sinners argues that when terror is normalized, resistance is not aberration. It is inevitability. History does not bend toward justice on its own. It bends because people push back, even when the cost is high. That is the film’s most unsettling and most honest claim. I give Sinners ★ ★ ★ ★ ★.

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Julian Vasquez Heilig is a scholar, former provost and dean, and public commentator whose work on equity, leadership, and social justice has appeared in national outlets; a lifelong cinephile. He’s grateful to Professor Margarita De la Vega-Hurtado from the University of Michigan’s American Culture Program, whose 1990s film class taught him as an undergraduate to read cinema as cultural text and social critique, for inspiring this practice. There are people who know I am fearless, and I do not back down from a challenge; like Elijah “Smoke” Moore and Elias “Stack” Moore, I address injustice head-on and defend liberty.