Reinvention is a Lie in Sinners

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

I think I left my true Indian heritage behind when I moved to Egypt in 2004 at the age of 3, and then to Dubai in 2008, which eventually became my permanent home. I never went back for good. Sure, I returned during the summers to visit my grandparents, but I never had the chance to build real roots there. At first, I was content with living a semi-privileged life in a foreign country where the usual stereotypes didn’t weigh me down too heavily, though internalized racism still found its way in, often in quiet, sneaky ways. But as the years passed and I grew older, I’ve become more and more saddened by the realization that I never developed a meaningful relationship with my country, forced to reinvent my identity elsewhere. Though my lived experience differs, it's what people, including my family, have told me.

I’m Indian and always will be, but being labelled a NRI (non-resident Indian) by my Indian friends and not being considered “Western” by my other friends left me stuck in between. I never quite knew where I belonged. And I know I’m not alone—third culture kids are everywhere, and I relate deeply to our subtle struggles and strange advantages. Still, that lack of a real, grounded community has followed me throughout my life. I moved countries several times, changed schools and cities even more, and by the end of it, I became more familiar with fresh starts than with any sense of stability. I didn’t mind it—I accepted that this was just who I was. It even became oddly comforting. Sometimes, if I wasn’t going through drastic changes, having new experiences, or finding new friend groups, it felt like I wasn’t really living. While I envied friends who had lifelong communities and stable upbringings, I also secretly judged them. They never had to start over. They didn’t know what it was like to make friends from scratch, to sit in quiet loneliness, or how to rebuild on your own. That push and pull—that craving for change and that hunger for belonging—is something I still haven’t figured out.

But more than that, I’ve been thinking about how obsessed our generation is with the idea of reinvention. A new city, a new look, a new job. A “glow-up.” We talk about cutting off entire friend groups like it’s self-care. And sometimes, it is. But a lot of the time, it’s just running away dressed up as growth. Ryan Coogler’s Sinners ripped that idea apart for me—in the best way possible. I think reinvention is a kind of common ground we all share, in one form or another.

The film, set in 1932 Mississippi, follows the twin brothers Smoke and Stack—both played with intense nuance by Michael B. Jordan—who returned home after years of working with the Chicago Outfit. They seem to want a second chance. They open a juke joint, not just to make money but to reconnect with family and community, to rewrite the narrative of who they are. But Sinners doesn’t let them off the hook that easily.

The film makes it clear from the start: the past doesn’t just fade away. It lingers. And sometimes, it bites back—literally, in the form of blood sucking, transforming vampires led by an Irish immigrant named Remmick. At first, you think this is just a genre flair—Coogler flexing his style. But the vampires aren’t just there for horror—they’re symbols. They represent generational trauma, exploitation, and the kind of history that refuses to stay buried. Remmick doesn’t just feed on the community—he colonizes it. Ironically, in the same way, his people were once colonized. It's as if problems left to be buried always rise up from the grave at some point.

Suddenly, everything the brothers are building—the juke joint, the chance at redemption, the hope for a clean slate—starts to feel fragile. Haunted. Even cursed. What I loved is how Coogler uses every element of the film to echo that. The lighting shifts: warm, nostalgic tones when things feel safe and communal, and harsh, cold blues when the past creeps back in. The music starts out joyful (and very catchy), but when the vampires get close, it turns jarring and eerie (still catchy). Even the brothers’ clothes change, starting out crisp and confident, then gradually becoming more ragged and bloodied as the story unfolds.

It’s like the illusion of reinvention is slowly being peeled away. There’s a spiritual layer to the film too, grounded in African diasporic traditions—Hoodoo, Yoruba. Smoke’s estranged wife, Annie, is a Hoodoo practitioner and maybe the wisest character in the film. She doesn’t want to erase the past—she wants to honour it. Her rituals are about remembering, not forgetting. There’s a line she says—“You can’t build a house on rotten wood.”— That’s the whole film really, because of how closely it mirrors reality.

Interestingly, the consequences are shifted when Annie's knowledge of tradition, instead of guns or brute force, protects the community. She uses sigils, chants, and ancestral memory to fight off the vampires. Coogler makes an interesting point: the past doesn’t just hurt—it can protect us if we embrace it. Survival, especially for marginalized communities, often comes from remembering, not running.

It's as if the illusion of reinvention is broken down because past scared rituals and lifestyles honour and remember the past, whether good or bad, like an ancient family's secret medicine that's never failed you when you had the flu or a hangover. Where Annie strategizes spiritual heritage, Sammie uses the blues music of his ancestors/heritage to defend his community. One scene in particular—where he plays a tune passed down from their grandmother and ghostly figures rise up to defend the juke joint—is haunting and beautiful.

Sammie doesn’t try to reinvent himself. He becomes a channel for something much older, something rooted. That, to me, is the kind of transformation that actually matters. The wins and victories in Sinners all stem from accepting, embracing, and utilizing the origins of black customs and traditions.

Watching Sinners, I couldn’t help thinking about my own life again. I’ve done what Smoke and Stack tried to do—of course, not even close in terms of the historical or dramatic weight—but moving around, hoping to become a new person each time. I told myself that was growth. That if I just kept shifting, I’d eventually land on the version of me that felt right. But the truth is, you can move to a new country, cut your hair, change your name—if you haven’t faced your own history, all you’re doing is dragging your unresolved stuff with you, like baggage you refuse to unpack.

I realized that when I’d appropriate my own culture while also criticizing it, without ever truly experiencing what it was like to live in India. My identity was shaped around wanting to have my cake and eat it too. As much as defending my struggles came in handy during privilege checks, I could also distance myself from my culture when it was convenient. My unresolved relationship with India—my complicated feelings about identity don’t just disappear because I’ve learned how to blend in. They surface in small, quiet ways: when I forget words in my mother tongue, when I feel like a guest in both Western and Indian spaces, when I realize I’ve never had a “homecoming” because I’ve never truly let myself belong.

Sinners is about a lot of things, and I don’t have the word count authorization to unpack it all. But watching it for the first time, what hit me the most was the way the film didn’t just challenge the personal fantasy of reinvention—it went after the bigger myth, the one society sells us: reinvention is easy, even noble. Smoke and Stack’s story isn’t just personal—it’s political. It reflects a long legacy of Black men forced to reinvent themselves in Western ways just to survive, always trying to outrun systems that won’t let them rest. Coogler doesn’t romanticize that. He shows how reinvention, without reckoning, is just survival in disguise. And that’s why the ending works so well.

It’s not clean. The vampires are fought off, but they’re not gone. The juke joint burns. Smoke stands haunted instead of victorious. The final shot is of a tree carved with ancestral symbols. No grand victory. No false redemption. Just memory, survival and the truth. Fortunately, blues music is one of the few cultural relics that the community is persistent in cultivating and keeping for themselves. The iconic dance scene with a mix of colourful cultural melodies and themes behind it unifies the people in the juke for one single night as they feel the freedom of reinvention they've never had.