Sinners: The Sin of Greatness?
- Zainy Aryf
- 16 hours ago
- 4 min read
With Michael B. Jordan’s first Academy Awards win and Sinners at the centre of the 2026 awards-season buzz, our Film and TV writer, Zainy, discusses the blood thirst and the blues, and how sinners rewrote modern cinema.
Sixteen Academy Award nominations should have felt like closure. Like proof. Like the end of a conversation that never should have been a debate to begin with. But Sinners did not arrive quietly, nor was it received gently. Instead, it lingered—haunting, divisive, deeply loved—leaving behind a question that refused to settle: why does greatness so often feel like something we hesitate to accept fully?
The first time I watched Sinners, I didn’t walk out of the cinema with answers. I walked out with a feeling. The kind that sits in your chest, unnamed, long after the credits roll. It is not a film that hands itself to you easily. It waits. It watches you back. And on the second viewing, maybe even the third, you begin to realise how much it had been telling you all along.
Foreshadowing exists everywhere in Sinners, but it is never loud. It hides in the blues humming beneath scenes, in the shadows that linger a second too long, in the repeated warnings Sammie’s father gives him about music. Warnings that sound, at first, like fear disguised as faith. “Music opens things,” he says, more than once. And only later do we understand that he wasn’t exaggerating.
Vampirism in Sinners is not about monsters in the traditional sense. It is symbolic—almost tender in its cruelty. Vampires live forever, but they live with hunger. They inherit history whether they want to or not. In this way, vampirism becomes a metaphor for greatness itself: to outgrow your origins, to consume and be consumed, to survive past the boundaries drawn for you. Sammie is not sinful because he desires music. He is sinful because he refuses to deny it. And the film dares to ask whether that refusal is damnation—or destiny.
And then there is the “I Lied To You” scene.
There are moments in cinema that feel historic as you’re watching them. This is one of them. What begins as a simple blues performance—Sammie’s voice slow, rich, almost hypnotic—gradually fractures time. The music stretches beyond the room, beyond the era, beyond the body. Blues becomes rock, becomes pop, becomes electronic, becomes something global and ancestral all at once. Cultures bleed into one another. Generations overlap. Asia appears not as an afterthought, but as a continuation. The scene stops being a scene and becomes a lineage.
It gave me goosebumps in the cinema. Not because it was flashy, but because it was truthful. Because it understood that music is not entertainment—it is memory. It is spirituality. It is history refusing to stay buried. In that moment, Sinners reveals its soul: music breaks walls. Between time. Between faith. Between the living and the dead.
Every soundtrack in the film carries this same weight. Nothing feels accidental. The blues ache. The silence speaks. The music does not simply accompany the story, but in fact is the story. In a landscape where soundtracks often fade into the background, Sinners reminds us of cinema’s original power: to move us through sound as much as image. It subtly but unmistakably shifts the trajectory of modern filmmaking, proving that music can be narrative rather than ornament.
At its core, Sinners is about belonging and isolation; about guilt that is inherited rather than earned and the loneliness of becoming something your community warned you against being. Sammie exists between worlds—faith and desire, reverence and rebellion, humanity and something more. The film refuses to punish him neatly for that tension. Instead, it sits with it and lets it ache.
As seen in the incredible box office numbers, people are going to the cinemas to watch (or rewatch) Sinners. What makes Sinners endlessly rewatchable is its restraint. It does not beg for your attention, but instead trusts you to come back. Each rewatch reveals another layer: a metaphor you missed, a look that now feels loaded, a line that suddenly lands heavier than before. Perhaps that is why audiences kept returning to theatres, why the film was extended far beyond expectation. Sinners does not exhaust itself; it only deepens.
Which makes its treatment during awards season all the more frustrating. Sinners deserved every nomination it received—and arguably more. Michael B. Jordan’s performance is restrained, devastating, and deeply human (and now, officially Oscar-winning!). And yet, once again, recognition slipped through his fingers. The contrast is impossible to ignore: the public endlessly sexualizes him, consumes him visually, but hesitates to honour his craft. It begins to feel less coincidental and more systemic. As though excellence is celebrated—just not crowned—when it comes from certain bodies.
Despite this, Sinners has been beloved. Especially within the Black community, where its themes of music as survival, faith as control, and greatness as burden resonate with particular intimacy. This is not a film that asks to be universally understood. It asks to be felt by those who see themselves inside it.
Years from now, Sinners will not be remembered for the debates surrounding it, but for what it dared to do. It is a cinematic masterpiece of our time—one that trusted its audience, challenged the medium, and refused to soften its edges. A film that will be looked back on as life-changing. Show-stopping. Highly necessary.
Maybe Sinners was never about sin at all. Maybe it was about what happens when greatness refuses to apologise.
Comments