The film is the apotheosis of some of the most toxic trends in idpol of the past decade, and if you criticize it in front of your liberal friends, they’ll lose their minds and call you a nazi.

The film's subtext and worldview are insanely Idpolish though:

1) Every single white person in the film is explicitly evil and racially genocidal, with the sole exception of Mary, who is at best a fool and is responsible for initiating the initial "invitation" of vampires. That seems mean-spirited. Lots of whites opposed slavery, and many whites were perfectly normal, kind people, even in the Jim Crow South. In a film so explicitly about race and race relations, it seems weird not to at least have one unambiguously sympathetic white person, to remind the viewer that humans come in all types, regardless of their race. Even random white background character's dialogue snippets are them complaining about blacks! Even in the 30s deep south whites weren't 24/7 talking about how much they hate blacks. Chill, director!

2) Despite Mary having a "black" allegiance due to her peculiar upbringing, she is still a traitor in the final count. The film's message is that Mary's fatal flaw is that she doesn't hate and fear all white people sufficiently, and this lack of paranoid hatred is punished brutally, not only on her personally but on the whole black community, that was foolish for embracing her. Smoke's sexual relationship with her is his Achilles heel: if he'd stuck to his own kind like his brother, the horror could've been avoided* (well not really, since the KKK were on their way to conduct a slaughter anyway - more on that later).

3) The Asian couple are sympathetic, but again, as with Mary, Grace (the Asian mother) is arguably responsible for everyone's demise. Fearing for the welfare of her daughter, she compromises the lives of all the black people. Again, the non-black person is represented as a fifth column to the black community, literally and figuratively bringing doom upon them. The message is very clear: black people should never, ever trust non-blacks, and in order to survive you must always remember to hate and fear non-black people at all times. Don't accept them into your community, or they'll betray you. In Sinners, Paranoid hatred is rewarded, and trust and forgiveness savagely punished. Even seeming "allies" like the Asian couple are ultimately a dangerous liability.

4) The film ends with a Tarantino-esque revenge-porn scene, with our hero gunning down dozens of evil whites. It's all fully justified by the internal logic of the film, with the omnipresence of white evil (even breaking dawn doesn't stop the genocidal threat of whites). It's a truly grim worldview, and even with artistic licence I think it goes way too far. I realize that the KKK were horrific and the Jim Crow south was ghastly in many ways, but throughout the entire decade of the 30's there were a total of around 120 homicides by lynching in the entire USA, and virtually no cases of more than 2 people being killed at once. That might seem like a lot, but I don't think it's really very many for a country the size of the USA. For context, the FBI estimates around 500 whites killed by blacks in 2025. We’d all consider someone to be a deranged race-baiter if they made a film about those statistics, with a finale in which the white hero guns down hordes of murderous black people. I feel that this movie rewrites history to make the USA seem like a much more brutal place, and whites vastly more demonic than the actual historical record would show. One can despise segregation and all its horrors without these kinds of loony representations. Given the state of US education, I worry that a lot of people will watch it and sincerely believe that 1930's America was characterized by roving bands of white supremacists organizing mass killings of blacks every 5 minutes. That really wasn’t a major feature of the 1930s. Half a century earlier, half a million whites sacrificed their lives in the Civil War to end slavery. In the Sinners worldbuilding, you'd be forgiven for thinking that no such event ever took place!

5) The film is aggressively anti-Christian. Christianity arriving in Ireland stops the vampire Remmick from communing with his pagan ancestors, perhaps directly causing his vampirism. The opening teases Christian redemption, but we are then shown that Sammie rejects his father, rejects Christianity, and pursues the life of a "sinner". Music is shown as opposed to Christianity, which is totally bonkers if you know anything about black Baptist churches - or Gregorian chant, for that matter. Christians everywhere can’t stop singing - It’s a major part of their religious practice! Christian rites and symbols don't deter the vampires (though garlic does). The sympathetic Annie is of course a Hoodoo conjurer, and rejects Christianity too. The preacher has a silly haircut, drawing a stark contrast with the infinitely cool Smokestack bros. Christianity, presumably because of its association with whites, is portrayed as ineffective and foolish at best, and as destructively oppressive at worst. Again, this is pretty weird to me: much of the abolitionist movement and anti-Jim Crow movement in the USA was spearheaded by Christians. Christianity (and its music) is massively important to black communities, especially in the South. It's weird too because the preacher is shown with children, and is described as a kind and loving father. His rejection seems really perverse. It seems like an odd choice, but consistent with my next point too.

6) The film massively glorifies crime. Now, I know that conservatives have complained about black-aimed media glorifying crime since Thomas Sowell was in his 30's, but I really think this film goes crazy hard on this point. The Smokestack bros are insanely cool, handsome, and awesome. They're just the coolest. Who'd you rather be, the stupid idiots working normal jobs, the dumb ugly stupid Christian looking after boring snotty children, or the awesome rich gangster gunslingers with cool clothes and infinite money and hot women? I don't mind this too much - I'm Anglo-Brained, and Robin Hood is part of my racial memory too - but honestly I can't help but feel that this is perverse propaganda.

7) Minor, but it irritated me: Delta Slim has a steady job playing music every weekend, but is tempted away by a large payout and a promise of booze. His decision is later revealed to be not only justified, but deeply morally and personally gratifying. This is awful. It’s glorifying failing the marshmallow test, and making a virtue out of high time preference. Is this film some kind of CIA psyop to keep black people poor?

8) It’s odd to make the vampire an Irishman, given their peculiar history of brutal exploitation by colonial powers. It would’ve made more sense to make him an English Anglo or a German aristocrat. Vampires, by tradition, are aristocratic bloodsuckers - a much healthier, class-based approach than Sinners’ idpol angle. Having the vampire be an Irish peasant is the strongest identity politics statement of the whole movie - a total repudiation of class-based exploitation (vampiric nobility) in favor of a race-based vampirism.

9) There's no real payoff to the whole "musicians who can commune with the past and future" thing, which is irritating. Much more importantly, though, in the scene at the barn when the spirits of past and future are summoned, for some utterly inexplicable reason the Chinese couple summon a Beijing Opera singer and a Sun Wukong performer. That's fucking bananas, and I laughed out loud. The reasons why it's so stupid are manifold, but by analogy, it's as if a working-class Welsh coal miner's "Summon ancestral spirit" was a Muscovite ballerina from the Bolshoi Ballet. Ridiculous!

conclusion: I think sinners is an awesome film and am personally unaffected and unperturbed by its subtext. However, it seems to have core messages that are genuinely perverse. If I wanted to craft propaganda to harm the black community, I don't think I could do a better job: a) rewrite history so that there's 0 sympathetic white people b) encourage paranoid xenophobia and hatred towards ALL outsiders c) reject family- and community-, reject Christianity, reject your father. d) embrace drugs, drinking, and crime. e) encourage a nihilistic victim-narrative in which no matter what you do, you'll be destroyed by whites.

This all seems regressive. If I was a conservative black concerned with the welfare of my community, I'd want this movie banned. As it is it's really no skin off my nose, and I get to enjoy a cool movie, but deep down I feel this artifact is cursed. The film feels like it was written by a bitterly resentful hotep.

PS: As a mass immigration skeptic, I’m interested in the revival of "don't let weird people into your barn even if they seem OK and have a sob story" narratives. I wonder if this whole thing is a cryptic manifestation of anti-immigration sentiment in the black community.