Ryan Coogler’s Communions with the Dead

No matter the setting or the genre, they exist between cuts and in music, echo through sound design or in digital effects signifying other planes of existence. A key sequence of his latest film, Sinners (2025), might be the strongest evocation of this idea. The film’s opening narration positions music as something with healing, spiritual power; it conjures apparitions of people who are dead and people who are yet to be born, all dancing and playing music together in the same juke joint. The film sees music as a kind of living memory, a modern vehicle for oral history. That history isn’t just contained in lyrics but also in the playing itself, and how that musical style is passed down through generations even as the genre shifts. 

From the eulogistic Fruitvale Station (2013) through legacy blockbusters such as Creed (2015) and Marvel franchises such as Black Panther (2018–), all of Coogler’s films feature some kind of communion with the spirits of the deceased. Coogler does this through in-camera trickery, editing, and framing, as well as with the arc of each film’s narrative. As Coogler put it to me in an interview,¹ he’s interested in humanizing people and cultures that aren’t always afforded such a sense of lived experience. After all, who has less of a voice than those who have passed on? 

While creating a connection with the deceased would become a subtle thematic thread throughout Coogler’s subsequent feature work, it’s the entire premise of Fruitvale Station, his feature film debut. It takes place over a day in the life of a real person, 22-year-old Oscar Grant (played by Coogler’s longtime collaborator Michael B. Jordan), just before his killing at the hands of transit police. Filmed in grainy 16-mm handheld shots by cinematographer Rachel Morrison (who would later work on Black Panther), Coogler’s film seeks to give Grant a voice, looking at his family life and the quotidian details of his final day that headlines and statistics didn’t reveal. 

His breakout film, the legacy sequel Creed, follows its wounded main character, Adonis Creed (Jordan again). Adonis struggles with the impulse to become a boxer and connect with his absent and now deceased father while also wanting to create a legacy of his own. Even 10 years after its release, there’s profound power in the moment when Coogler uses the language of film—simple cuts and provocative composition—to bring Adonis closer to his father, finding a kind of spiritual transcendence through sport. 

While this echoing sense of loss is never spoken of aloud (thankfully), the two main characters, the rookie Adonis and the veteran Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone in one of his most soulful performances), connect through it. An early scene depicts Balboa tending to two graves: his wife Adrian’s and his friend Paulie’s. He pulls up a chair, unfurls a paper, and talks with them about his day, updating them on the most mundane happenings. Balboa’s own reckoning with loss is a quiet and powerful reflection of Adonis’s journey. 

An early moment in Creed continues Coogler’s immortalizing of those real and fictional. Adonis sits in a media room and throws a YouTube video on a projector that shows his late father fighting Rocky Balboa. It’s grainy archive footage from the 1979 movie Rocky II, a moment that now feels like a glimmer of memory for the actor Carl Weathers. The phantasmal effect of this clip extends beyond the film, prompting audiences to remember a character who once lived. Adonis stands and begins to throw punches and duck them in time with the fight as the image projects over him. But rather than imitate his father, he battles him, trying to anticipate his movements, in a moment expressive of his complicated relationship with a man he never knew but whose shadow looms large. 

Later, in a more climactic bout, as Adonis is knocked unconscious by his opponent, little flashes of Adonis’s life, moments already witnessed across the course of the film, are intercut with him slowly dropping to the mat face-first. The most powerful moment of the quick montage is also its quietest: a simple cut to archive footage of Apollo ducking and weaving with a smile on his face. After this, Adonis suddenly rises to his feet “like a man possessed,” as one of the match commentators describes. Adonis is never able to actually speak to Apollo, of course, but still connects with him in one moment of transcendence. Through an elegant wielding of the archive, his father’s spirit reaches him. Sinners does something similar before the death of one of its lead characters, Stack (again, Jordan), who sees his partner and their child reach for him from the afterlife, outside of the frame.  

This connection between the worlds of the living and the dead is made even more explicit in Coogler’s Black Panther. There is a very literal ancestral plane, where all of the previous Black Panthers go after their death, connected by the “heart-shaped herb.” The herb is itself an intergenerational tradition: each Black Panther before the protagonist, T’Challa, has taken it in order to gain the powers they use to protect their people, as well as strengthening their connection to the panther god, Bast. T’Challa’s father, also a Black Panther, has taken it and therefore exists in this ancestral plane—still just within reach of his son. 

Black Panther reclaims Stan Lee’s well-meaning Afrofuturist fantasy of Wakanda. First created to upend expectations of an African superhero, Lee’s Wakanda was a regency of a powerful, self-determining imperial nation. It’s reflected in the visual design, characterized by metallic spires and other displays of wealth and ingenuity. Coogler layers this original vision with his own personal response to Africa as an ancestral homeland that African Americans are disconnected from through the American slave trade. The ancestral plane is a key part of that fantasy: a desire to discover one’s roots and see them laid bare before you, a dream of a lost history made accessible again. Sinners has its own take on this fantasy, as it explores the ancestral search further. It’s not something documented so much as it is felt, and both music and dance serve as an expression of that feeling. The appearance of West African dancers in the juke joint scene makes this lineage feel eternal, something accessible every time you consider the music.  

Perhaps more so than any of Coogler’s other works, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) is a film in mourning. It begins with a funeral for T’Challa, and in turn his actor, Chadwick Boseman, who passed away from cancer in between films. T’Challa is also said to have passed away from illness, furthering the connection between the actor and character, bringing the metatext of the cast and crew dealing with this loss into plain view. For the rest of the film, T’Challa’s sister, Shuri (Leticia Wright), and his mother, Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett), grieve him—though even as the line “death is not the end” appears as a refrain from the first film, there’s no balm to be found from the evocation of the ancestral plane. That Killmonger (Jordan once again) instead appears to Shuri is another painful twist on this spiritual premise, that this connection isn’t quite a replacement for the flesh-and-blood person who has passed. 

Coogler’s most recent feature, Sinners, is built from a similar ambient grief. The first seeds of the idea came from his time working on Wakanda Forever, provoked by the murder of rap artist Young Dolph: “I was thinking about the genre of rap and how often I shout out, like, an artist I’m listening to, who I’m maybe the same age as . . . [who] would lose their life in a situation. You can tell their music was haunting them, or they were trying to escape.”² Thinking about the impact that an artist’s personal demons could have on their music, Coogler asked his producer for recommendations for other similarly haunted genres of music. This ask led Coogler to explore the culture of grunge, where he heard blues riffs that reminded him of his uncle from Mississippi who first got him into blues music. Following that uncle’s passing, Coogler would listen to blues music as a way to stay connected to him. 

This intertwining of personal, historical, and musical lineage is at the heart of Sinners. The film is set across the course of one day in 1932 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and follows “Smoke” and his identical twin brother, “Stack,” (real names Elijah and Elias, respectively, and both played by Jordan) as they establish a juke joint in their hometown with money and booze stolen from Chicago gangs. Along for the ride is their cousin Sammie (Miles Caton). Knocking his debut role out of the park, Caton plays the son of a preacher and an aspiring blues musician. Sammie is a virtuosic guitarist and singer, and his seemingly divine skill is great enough to attract the attention of some rather hellish creatures. His abilities provoke the attention of haints, and the spiritual power of his music becomes the catalyst for Sinners’ most technically audacious sequence. “We brought this with us. . . . It’s sacred,” a man says of the blues before the film’s centerpiece—the visual realization of its thesis—unfolds in spectacular fashion. In a single unbroken take, shot in full-frame IMAX, cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw’s camera swoops through a lively juke joint. Sammie plays a song expressing how he chafes against his father’s repressive view of Christianity. His singing seemingly conjures the spirits of the dead and those not yet born. This pins him as part of a lineage of griots and filídh—lyricists and poets responsible for carrying the memory of their communities in West African and Irish culture, respectively. 

As he plays, the room contains the past, the present, and the future of music—not just for the African diaspora but for all the displaced peoples and immigrants in that room. Gospel choir, player piano, reverb, 808s and electric drums, harmonica, and G-Funk synths join Sammie in chorus as his music reaches into the future. That fusion is also present on the screen. Electric guitarists dressed like Sun Ra, DJs and MCs, and women twerking, all in the very same juke joint as Sammie’s music, unmoor the film from time and space to earth-shaking, emotional effect. 

The soundtrack from Ludwig Göransson, a collaborator of Coogler’s since Fruitvale Station, is a pivotal element of Sinners. Even before the centerpiece single-take sequence, the composer  threads hints towards the polyphonic chaos of the film’s second half. He begins to fold contemporary sounds and instruments when the lead antagonist, Remmick, an ancient Irish vampire, makes his first appearance. His arrival is announced with the crash of modern drum kits and electric guitar riffs resembling heavy metal. It’s accompanied by matching notes on a church organ and a choir dramatically wailing. This evocation of modern musical styles continues into “It’s Magic What We Do,” as it’s called on the soundtrack album. Göransson continues to layer these different genres on top of the base of Caton’s voice and the distinct twang of his guitar. All of this precisely controlled chaos encapsulates how music immortalizes people, “an affirmation of humanity,”³ as Coogler puts it. By giving the blues a means to access the past, Coogler is able to trace the connections between Dolph, grunge, and blues riffs.  

The aforementioned long-take sequence of Sammie’s performance also encompasses the importance of communion with Black artists. Art carries our history when institutions prove less than reliable in doing so: just look at how the current administration is targeting records of Black history as well as diversity and inclusion schemes.⁴ Music is itself a kind of oral history, and Coogler’s ideas for Sinners stemmed in part from a desire to connect with his family roots in Mississippi. “I’d never been to Mississippi,” Coogler said in our interview, “[but] my maternal grandfather was born and raised there before he moved to Oakland. So this place was so connected to my history.”⁵

Personal histories are not reserved only for the Black characters in Coogler’s films: Wakanda Forever considers colonialism beyond Africa through the fictional city of Talokan. Similar to Wakanda, the underwater stronghold is a refuge for Indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica from the violence of Spanish colonization. Sinners continues this intersectional approach through its supporting cast, some of it composed of other displaced and colonized peoples in the Delta in the twentieth century. There’s a Chinese family, led by Bo and Grace Chow (played by Yao and Li Jun Li, respectively); their lineage is represented with Chinese instruments and dancers during the single-take musical sequence. This also includes Remmick, to some extent, as he watches the performance from outside. Writer Esther Rosenfeld highlights that Remmick is also trying to tap into a “collective folk consciousness”⁶ and connect with his ancestors. The problem is, as Rosenfeld highlights, he struggles with a sense of authenticity, having been disconnected for so long. 

As the critic Kelli Weston points out in her review of the film, Remmick and, to some extent, the Smokestack twins are emblematic of another thread running through Coogler’s filmography, “that no one who embraces the American project may escape its grotesque transformations.”⁷ Remmick himself has become overtaken by this instinct to appropriate rather than collaborate and iterate. He says quite plainly to Sammie, “I want your stories,” seeking the output while destroying the man—a fulfillment of Delta Slim’s observation that white people “love the blues, just not the people who make it.”

This consideration of the destructive “American Project,” as Weston calls it, is part of why Coogler’s characters are so familiar with death. Colonialism and imperialism continually seek to destroy the diaspora—and Black art. After Fruitvale Station, even his more crowd-pleasing work is driven by an impetus to reflect on the morbidity on the other side of the spectacle, of Black sportsmen, musicians, even regents. In such moments, in such a context, art takes on a higher spiritual calling, a connection between the living and the dead, the wisdom or strength of older generations called upon to assist the present. Since his debut feature’s release in 2013, Coogler has gifted us a Black oral history of lost families and loved ones. With the visual and sonic experimentation of Sinners, Coogler’s communions with the past have found their most complex realization yet.