As “Sinners” prepares to potentially make history at the 2026 Oscars on Sunday, we thought it’d be fitting to revisit this groundbreaking film one more time. While we love the film and will continue to sing its praises for years to come, there are still a handful of questions that were left unanswered when the credits started rolling that we want to raise!
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Now before you get you britches in a bunch, please know these questions are all in good fun. But we are lowkey serious about getting these answers because we feel they’d make the story that much richer.
Was Pearline Justified in Cheating on Her Husband?
If you’ve seen the film (which you should have by now), you already know that Pearline (played by Jayme Lawson)—who served as the love interest to Sammie “Preacher Boy” Moore (played by Miles Caton)—was a married woman. Yet that didn’t stop her from having a…um…sexual rendezvous with him when they were at the Club Juke later in the evening.
And while choosing to step out on her man and hook up with Sammie may warrant criticism, in a new interview with Lawson on the “Higher Learning” podcast, she explained that her situation is a bit more nuanced than we initially thought.
“When you’re talking about Black women, sharecroppers in the South, often married off young. So the vision of who this husband was is always fascinating to me,” Lawson said. “Because in the conversations I had with Ryan and building up who this husband was—this is an older man that she had no choice in marrying. So my freedom in who I got to be partnered with got taken away from me. So I’m now joined to this older man I had no choice in it. Cool.”
She continued: “This man that I’m supposed to expect to love me, care for me, take care of me. Yet there might be some violence happening in the home, right? What is it, also then, if he is supposedly a ‘man of God’ and what he brings home with that, right?”
Lawson concluded by asking whether her lack of freedom may have pushed her out the door.
“Where is her freedom in this marriage that then forces her to step out and go to this juke? She’s in search of something that she could not get at her home,” she said.
Hmmm. Interesting. So was her husband legit abusive and mean? Or did she truly just want to do her own thing?
Who Did Sammie’s Guitar Really Belong to?
When Sammie goes to pick up helpers to get Club Juke off the ground, Stack (played by Michael B. Jordan) tells him that the guitar he and his twin brother Smoke (also Jordan) gifted to him years prior used to belong to legendary Blues singer Charley Patton. However, by the end of the movie, Smoke tells Sammie that the guitar actually belonged to their “evil” dad.
So which one is it really? Yes, we know Smoke is the more reliable twin, but it’s highly plausible that the twins could’ve won it off Patton as they were hustlers, too! We need the truth, ASAP.
What Really Went Down with the Smokestack Twins in Chicago?
OK, so director Ryan Coogler did us a solid in January when he filled in the timeline a bit on where the Smokestack Twins headed after they left Clarksdale, Mississippi, the first time. However, the film only makes it clear that the twins were at some point working with Al Capone and then later working for rival gangs. Even Jordan’s later explanation of what transpired while they were there leaves more questions than answers.
“[The twins were doing work] that Capone didn’t want to do himself because [rival gangs] would know it was from Capone,” Jordan said at the time. “Amongst that, they started to figure out who the major players were, the Italians, the Hans. You hear them talking about the different types of gangsters that were running Chicago and they figured how to take advantage of the situation and get out of there and start our own sh*t.”
That makes sense on the surface, but what kind of jobs were they doing? Stealing? Killing? Cheating? Gambling? Enforcing? There are just too many holes here!
What’s Really Up With the Choctaw Vampire Hunters?
Before the Irish immigrant vampire Remmick (played by Jack O’Connell) descends upon Club Juke to wreak havoc, he’s chased down by a group of Choctaw Indigenous people who are seeking to capture him. When Remmick finds refuge in the home of a KKK couple, the Choctaw try to warn them that he’s not what he seems, but they return to where they’re from before the sun goes down and things take a turn for the worse.
Now let’s face it: Indigenous people hunting down white folks sounds like a wrong turned right. So we definitely deserved to know a little bit more about their backstory. How did they get involved in vampire hunting in the first place? How long did they know about the existence of vampires? Why couldn’t they have warned others in Clarksdale about their impending doom? If they captured Remmick before—how??
What Happened to Lisa Chow?
When Smoke goes into town to get supplies needed to open up Club Juke, he goes to a general store run by his old friend, Bo Chow (played by Thomas Pang). He’s the husband of wife Grace and father of their daughter Lisa, who helps work at the store with them.
Sadly, both Bo and Grace end up getting caught up in the fight against the vampires and never make it back to Lisa. So what happened to her? Who went back and gave her the news that both her parents died and her dad turned into a vampire?? Did she keep running the stores by herself? Did she have any family? How was her childhood affected by losing the only people who were closest to her?
Did Sammie Ultimately Sell His Soul to the Devil to Achieve Success?
In the end, we see Sammie leave Clarksdale and head elsewhere with his broken guitar in hand to keep singing the blues. The timeline jumps forward to an older Sammie (played by real-life blues singer Buddy Guy) playing at his Club Pearline. While there, he gets a surprise visit from the vampire Stack, who commends him for all the musical success he’s amassed over the years. But how exactly did Sammie become such a big star??
We know his story was likely inspired by late, Blues singer Robert Johnson who,—lore has it—sold his soul to the devil in exchange for fame and fortune and guitar prowess. But could the same be said of Sammie, too? After all, he did have the gift and the voice, but was only as big as Clarksdale would let him be. Did he strike a deal with the wrong demon in order to live the life he always wanted?
Was Stack Mary’s Pimp?
As we mentioned earlier, there was a point in time when the Smokestack Twins came back to Clarksdale and did their own thing. Smoke stayed with Annie (played by Wunmi Mosaku) and tried to build a life with her, while Stack took his childhood friend Mary (played by Hailee Steinfield) to Little Rock, Arkansas. But we still have some outstanding questions regarding Stack and Mary’s time.
In several instances in the movie, there are allusions to him being a pimp. He even refers to himself as one at one point. In another scene, Smoke asks him if he ever let “a John” pay with fake cash while he was “selling ass in Little Rock.” Both of those things point to Stack dealing in sex work.
The same could be said of Mary as she persuaded Stack to let her go and talk to Remmick and the other vampires to see if they could get some money out of them. The way Stack slides a gun in her leg makes it seem like they’d done this song-and-dance before—which would make sense if Mary needed protection while she was out here engaging in sex work. Still, it’s unclear if Stack was her pimp or if she was working alongside him the whole time. We need to get to the bottom of this quickly!
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