Ryan Coogler’s new vampire musical “The Sinner” is one of the best movies of 2025. It tells the story of the same twins, Elijah and Elias Moore. It is called smoke and stack. Open a successful juke joint. They know musicians and potential employees, and know the old barns they can buy – owned by old racist white people. When they rush through town to get supplies, they each reconnect with their old friends and lovers. Their jukejoints are business opportunities, but they are also a way to reshape the scattered black community and save their reputation.
advertisement
There are also vampires. While the Juke Club is in full swing, a trio of white people who know Irish folk music attempts to invade. They insist they want to play alongside talented blues musician Sammy Inside (Miles Katon), but it is clear they want to drink everyone’s blood and use Sammy’s musical abilities. It turns out that “sinner” is at least partly about the white adoption of black music. White musicians literally eat black people.
The two employees who smoke and stack up are Grace and Bochou (Yao and Li Junri), Chinese immigrants who own a thriving general store in the middle of the Mississippi Delta. Grace is hired to draw dance club signs. By chance, the store where Chaws sells products is historically accurately impressive, overseen by cooler cultural consultant Dolly Lee. In fact, as seen in the documentary series, the shop was designed to look exactly like the Asian-owned store in Mississippi in 1932. “An untold story of American southern Chinese.”
advertisement
The Sinner’s Butterfly Shop was designed after an actual Chinese-owned shop in the Mississippi Delta
Dolly Lee was one of the producers of the above documentary and hosted it. Her insights were well studied and invaluable in Ryan Coogler’s films. According to Vulture articleLi and Coogler began communicating after watching her documentary series and were impressed by how personal it was. Cooler’s stepfather apparently had a Chinese Delta ancestor, and he knew he needed to represent the existence of a Chinese-owned company in his films.
advertisement
In “The Sinner,” Chaws owned two shops that stood across the street from each other. One serves the black community, and the other is white people. This is based very directly on the actual Greenville in Mississippi and depicted in Li’s film Min Sang & Co. It’s a shop called Grocery. These shops, once on Alexander Street, also opened in the 1930s, providing about 70% of their groceries to the local black community. Sadly, these stores seem to be closed now. Lee was surprised that Coogler thought he would include kanji in his films. I’m saying it on Twitter:
“I know 100% that Ryan made the store owner white or black and no one could hit the eyes. To insist on including them – resurface this document and history – now it’s friendship.”
advertisement
“The Sinner” featured Chouz’s teenage daughter Lisa (Helena Who), in a small role. Li’s documentary speaks to a woman named Jean Maskas and recalls growing up in her parents’ Mississippi grocery store, living in the back (at the time, Chinese people were not allowed to own property). Lisa could potentially stand in for a woman like Mascus. Or, given her age, Mascus’ mother has clear memories of it being the child of Chinese parents, serving the black community in the South of the age of separation.
These details seem rich and lively, created by people who want to capture the black and Chinese experiences of Mississippi in the 1930s. Well done, everyone.
