Understanding Remmick

I'm not saying he's right, I'm saying he's real

Spoilers for Sinners (2025)

I went into Sinners completely blind. I don’t watch trailers, so I didn’t even know that Michael B. Jordan would be playing twins. I figured that I would enjoy the movie, but I didn’t expect it to reach inside me and touch my soul.

I am a Southern African-American from North Carolina. I don’t know anything about my family’s history, on either side, before they stepped foot in the “New World”. I know that my paternal side was sold at Charleston market and (assumably) worked various plantations in South Carolina until my great-grandfather’s family moved up to North Carolina and we’ve lived here since. The only other thing I know is that the first thing my family did when emancipated was build a church. I consider myself blessed to even know this much about my people.

I am a practitioner of the African-American spiritual tradition, Hoodoo. I won’t be getting into the specifics of my practice on here today (or ever probably), but it’s pertinent to know for the rest of this piece. I honor my ancestors daily through prayer, ritual, and communion. They are my roots and I feel it’s my duty to thank them for all they endured for me to be here, enjoying the life that I have.

I’m not asking you to share my beliefs, quite frankly what other people think of my faith has literally nothing to do with me. I just ask that you respect that I hold these beliefs dear and they shape my viewing of the film, which literally talks about Hoodoo.

I never expected to find a piece of media that so accurately captures my feelings when I commune with my ancestors, but Sinners managed to do that and more. Every time I watch the scene where Sammie is singing and all the ancestors and descendants come to join in the festivities, I get chills and tears just start welling up in my eyes. I feel seen, I feel understood, I feel light.

Being a Hoodoo has fundamentally changed the way that I interact with the world around me, it makes me feel more connected, more in tune. I think that’s why I’m able to understand where Remmick, the antagonist, is coming from. He’s a vampire from a pre-Christianized Ireland, making him over a thousand years old. He’s seen the world shift and change, the world where humans and nature lived in harmony is no more, we’ve put ourselves on a pedestal, above the natural world around us.

“Those men lied to themselves and lied to us. They told stories of a God above and devil below. And lies of a dominion of man over beast and Earth. We are Earth and beast and God. We are woman and man. We are connect, you and I…to everything.”

Remmick, Sinners (2025)

Remmick’s goal throughout the movie is to turn Sammie, the protagonist and griot, into a vampire so that their shared consciousness might grant him access to the music that would allow him to see his people again. And to be completely real with you, I get him. If I were a vampire who’s well over a millennia old, I too would do everything within my power for the chance to see my kin again. And we see him try his own music. There’s a scene where Remmick river dances and sings the old Irish song “Rocky Road to Dublin”. It’s obvious his goal is for his people, his ancestors to speak to him, he even puts his arms in the air as though he’s inviting them down. But they don’t.

The movie’s resident hoodoo, Annie (fucking MVP by the way), says that vampirism traps your soul in the body so that you can’t rejoin your ancestors. That you're left to be surrounded by all the hate that earth has and again we see that in Remmick. Sure, he says he believes in equality, but let’s not pretend that when he was being chased by the Choctaw that he didn’t use his White privilege to hide with fucking Klan members. He refers to the Indigenous people as “dirty” because he knows that demonizing them will get the White people to trust him.

I believe that Annie acts as a foil to Remmick. Where he is disconnected from his people, his ancestry, his land, and tries to violently steal a way to see them again, Annie is deeply connected. There’s a scene when we first meet Annie and she’s striking a match in tune with the music as though she herself can hear it. Her mojo bag keeps Smoke safe when he’s fighting Stack at the end of the movie. She knew she was going to die and she greeted death bravely, her only request was that she was killed before she was turned so that she could be with her baby in the afterlife. In the end we see her dressed in all white nursing her baby girl. She gets to be with Smoke and their daughter.

We never get to see what happens to Remmick, where he goes when he dies, what he sees. He just goes up in flames and looks to the sun in his final moments. He hadn’t seen in over a millennia, so I imagine that was nice.

I’m a very empathetic person, it’s something I’ve intentionally cultivated in myself. I hate being misunderstood, so I try my best to understand others. I get the commentary being made. Remmick is a literal vampire, feeding off of Black culture because he feels disconnected from his own. The deal made with White supremacy is that you can access Whiteness and all its benefits at the expense of your own culture and heritage. I get that, but extracting Remmick from the commentary and just viewing him as an individual, I understand him too.

Song Playing: Cross Road Blues by Robert Johnson

Thank you so much for reading. Sinners is definitely one of my favorite movies of all time and I would love to hear your thoughts on this piece!

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