Sinners, the 2025 American sci-fi film written, co-produced, and directed by Ryan Coogler, set in 1932 American south, has garnered significant attention, both commercially and critically, for its visceral depiction of machismo and the craziness under a lighting specifically designed for Black skin. But beneath the acclaim lies a troubling pattern—a familiar boxing-in of Black art within frameworks designed to be digestible to western audiences and the entertainment industry at large. This marketing strategy, often masked as authenticity with Black faces at the forefront, echoes longstanding issues in how Black stories are curated, censored, and sold pushing messages of individualism, monotheism and division.

“I get concerned when pain becomes the primary currency for Black creatives to succeed,” said filmmaker Ava DuVernay in a 2021 panel on Black storytelling.“ There is so much more to us—joy, absurdity, love, futurism—but these rarely get the same support.”

Sinners, while not without nuance, largely conforms to that mold. Its use of spiritual horror and supernatural forces as metaphors for racism recalls Jordan Peele’s Get Out, but it ultimately reverts to familiar conclusions: redemption through suffering, individual transformation, and personal sacrifice.

At its core, Sinners demonstrates what could be called “safe rebellion”—stories of pain, struggle, and redemption that confirm dominant cultural narratives about Black suffering while failing to interrogate deeper truths about systemic oppression, resistance, and joy. The film’s portrayal of Blackness is deeply emotional but structurally conservative, praising the colonized version of Black spiritual connection and creating a villain out of Blackness outside of the realms of Christianity; allowing it to fit neatly into an industry that rewards expressions of trauma while avoiding the polytheistic origins that often under grid ALL histories.

“The problem isn’t just that we’re telling stories about pain,” said Dr. Imani Perry, professor of African American Studies at Princeton, in a 2022 Atlantic interview. “It’s that we rarely tell the full story—of how our people came from royalty, healers and radicals. That’s where our power lies.”

In Sinners, resistance is spiritual and symbolic, not political or collective. This aesthetic strategy, while emotionally powerful, risks reinforcing a sense of Black passivity—of enduring, not challenging. Moreover, the film’s historical framing is both selective and sanitized. While it nods to real injustices, it sidesteps the full, messy truth of Black American resistance, resilience, and complexity. Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad has noted that Black communities are often depicted “as problems in need of policing rather than people in need of justice.” Sinners, intentionally or not, flirts with this frame, leaving its protagonist trapped in a cycle of self-blame without fully contextualizing the structures that shape his world. In this way, Sinners participates in what bell hooks critiqued as “the commodification of Otherness,” where Black identity becomes a consumable aesthetic, stripped of its political sharpness.

*Michael B Jordan (center) in Sinners. Photograph: Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures*

Who Gets to Be Complex?

While Sinners features complex characters, their complexity is often in service of trauma. Smoke and Stack, the film’s protagonists, are rendered compelling largely through their suffering. Their spiritual reckoning is moving, but rooted in personal guilt rather than systemic critique.

The issue, then, is not Sinners itself and its underlying messages of complacency and individualism—but the structural forces that elevate these kinds of films while suppressing others. Where is the support for narratives that explore Black science fiction, satire, romance, or mundane suburban life?

“Black trauma is easy to commodify,” said author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. “It’s legible, it fits into historical timelines, and it doesn’t ask white audiences to see themselves implicated. But radical Black joy or self-determination? That’s still too dangerous.”

Indeed, Hollywood often sidelines stories of Black wealth, imagination, or world-building unless they are mediated through a trauma narrative. Contrast this with how white-led films enjoy the full spectrum of human experience—from the absurd (Napoleon Dynamite) to the utopian (La La Land).

This isn’t to say that the creators of Sinners lack sincerity or talent. But their work exists within an ecosystem that rewards Black pain over Black power, emotional catharsis over systemic critique. The success of Sinners reveals more about the boundaries imposed on Black creators than it does about the story itself.

The Way Forward

Of course, Sinners still represents progress. From its casting and producing to it’s visual language, religious subtext, and symbolic complexity it proves that mainstream Black cinema can be ambitious and beautiful and as a people we know how to create. What’s needed next is a broadening of the gate—not just for “difficult” stories, but for all stories.

Until the film industry embraces the full spectrum of Black artistry—unapologetic, politically engaged, historically grounded—we will continue to see brilliant films like Sinners achieve success by conforming to the boundaries of American storytelling rather than the boundlessness of Black life. That, in itself, is a subtle but insidious form of racism: a half-truth passed off as the whole story.

As Coogler himself said in an earlier interview about Black Panther: “The future of Black film is not in any one genre or tone. It’s in freedom—the freedom to tell whatever story we want.”

To achieve that, Hollywood must not only champion Black creators, but also raise the expectations of storytelling. In the meantime, consumers must be more selective with your choice in entertainment, demonstrate the power of the Black dollar and to boost films that explore a larger scope of Blackness, not just what we’ve been through. Only then can Black art be truly free—unboxed, and finally whole.