[Film Review] "Sinners" is a story that someone must forgive someday.

Sinners
USA, 2025
Director: Ryan Kruger

It is said that Robert Johnson was once gifted the 《Blues》 by a devil he met at a crossroads.
Did he ask the devil for it, or did his talent summon the devil? That remains unknown. However, it is certain that anything with the power to endure and be passed down through time attracts both good and evil.

Blues, along with gospel and jazz, is called "roots music" of Black music.
It branches out like a water vein, leading to genres of music that continue to the present day, such as R&B, soul, funk, and hip-hop. One could say that if you trace the roots of these genres, you arrive at the blues.

And of course, one can seek even earlier origins for the blues. It is the dance music of Africa, their ethnic homeland.
In this way, it can be said that no music widely known today can exist on its own, and if you follow it, it can be connected in one long, continuous line.

Set in 1930s America (*1), this film centers on the blues played by the protagonist, a young man named Sammy (Miles Caton), who possesses the voice of God and a devilish guitar. It perfectly visualizes and sonifies such musical connections from the past to the future, and by extension, the connection of souls with ancestors and descendants.
There have been many films with wonderful performance scenes in the past, but this is the first time (at least for me) I have seen one that approaches such a spiritual essence. In a word, it is a sense of wonder, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say it has left a mark on film history.

Three white people wander into the hall exclusively for Black people that Sammy is driving into a frenzy, and they are, believe it or not, evil vampires.

And they are surprisingly carrying banjos and fiddles, singing British and Irish ballads/folk music, bluegrass... in other words, the roots music of white people.
This design for vampires is also so novel that I couldn't stop being surprised and laughing, while at the same time, the performances are so good and the voices so pleasant that the line between good and evil starts to glitch. Is this also a kind of magic of music?

While putting white culture to the fore, the vampires appear as exploiters who suck blood and steal souls. What one is inevitably made to realize here is that it clearly presents a composition of criticism against "cultural appropriation".

In the history of popular music that has developed since WWII, this topic is now unavoidable. There is even a line in the film: "White people love the blues. They just hate the Black people who sing it."

The music that has been called rock and pop and has topped the charts also has its source material in R&B (even The Beatles and The Stones were initially R&B cover bands), and if you go back further, you arrive at rock 'n' roll based on the blues.

The blues, which originally sang of the hardships of life for Black slaves, eventually transformed into rock and began to make white people dance, and before long, it became the face of the white-dominated entertainment industry... that can be called harmony in a sense, but some people think of it as a form of exploitation. In fact, in the entertainment/music industry, asymmetries such as racial pay gaps have long remained uneradicated. This is the basis for calling a lack of respect "appropriation."

The vampires in this film can share even memories and pain through a network once they take someone in as a fellow member of their kind, and they try to lure the protagonists by emphasizing words like "fraternity" and "family". However, it is said that when you become a vampire, your soul is severed from your ancestors and you become trapped.
This state of affairs overlaps with the overview of popular music history mentioned above (incorporating into the culture and business of the powerful), and reminds me of the hippie culture that captivated young people (mostly white) in the UK and US along with the popularity of psychedelic rock in later years, such as "Summer of Love" and "Love and Peace".

The protagonists confront these vampires to protect their place. In a sense, this is a cultural war lost from the surface of history.

The protagonists' place (the hall) is a "territory" (the hall is a building bought from white people) that they finally managed to seize after the Emancipation Proclamation, having finally obtained the blade of counterattack called "money = economy", and it is also a symbol of their soul and pride. In the beginning of the film, the importance of money/business negotiations is emphasized repeatedly.

On the other hand, it is revealed that they also stole goods like alcohol from Irish and Italian (i.e., white) mafias, and this seems to hint at an endless chain of violence, as if to say "what goes around comes around". The power of capital may also have been a double-edged sword that they were gifted by the devil, just like the blues.

Now, this is going to sound a bit like a complaint... but the final act becomes quite like a standard vampire horror/action movie, and despite the flashy visuals, it loses momentum, which was disappointing.

And that disappointment also applies to the landing point of the themes raised so far.

In the end, the "angry" fighting pose shown by the protagonists (the creators) is never lowered (even after a scene that feels like a final nail in the coffin), and the film ends. I see... so it ends up like that after all...

I am well aware that this is something I can say easily because I live in an island nation that is, after all, centered on a single ethnic group and where racial issues are a "nuru-ge" (easy game), but precisely because the first to middle parts were brilliant, I wanted to see what lies beyond that "anger".

Isn't the act of placing white people as villains/monsters in the form of vampires a move that is itself violent and relies on a position where they "cannot argue back"?
Of course, I think they have the freedom and right to express their regret and anger. I understand that even as time passes, the flames of BLM have not yet been extinguished, or rather, will surely never be extinguished. But is that really okay?

If I am scolded for being naive, I will gladly accept that criticism, but I still want to say that someone has to forgive. Especially since this film uses music as a perfect subject—
the potential for coexistence and co-creation (*2)—and while it shows such wonderfully creative expression as mentioned above, in the end, didn't it just use that as a "weapon"? I was thinking about this from the frontier of Japan, a place that has conveniently borrowed music from both sides to cultivate its own super-Galapagos music known as J-POP.

In short, if you're going to do it, I wish you had finished it with a singing battle. I wanted them to win by showing off a sound with such depth that it could accept and evolve even with the enemy (the devil), in contrast to the weak sounds of those whose only goal was to take. Why? Because we are fortunate enough to know that music has that much potential.

Notes

*1: Decades after the Civil War, Mississippi (the South), where the film is set, was a region where discrimination was particularly severe. It was also the height of the second KKK.

In this situation, Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who is of mixed Black and White heritage, was a character in an interesting position as a mediator between the two worlds, but it was a shame she turned into a vampire so early on.

However, I do wonder if the "one-drop rule" of the time (where anyone with even a single drop of African blood in their lineage was considered Black) had some influence here.

*2: Hiring a master like Ludwig Göransson, a Swede (White), could be considered one possibility in a sense. Also, a certain band that appears in the post-credits scene is racially mixed (I believe the drummer was White). However, if you look at it cynically, could one accuse it of being a "reverse appropriation" of talent?

The connection between Göransson and director Ryan Coogler began with the MCU's "Black Panther."
Especially in the second film, "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", he showed an approach of imagining and creating music from historical documents, not just African music but also ancient Mexican music. His interpretation of the blues this time is likely an extension of his almost music-archaeological method.

*3: This text seems to refer to White-to-Black hatred (and the discriminatory consciousness rooted in it), but I think there are now cases where it can be applied in reverse.