This article contains spoilers for Sinners, in Irish cinemas now.
A beloved Irish standard, ‘Rocky Road to Dublin’ describes the travails and troubles of a young man who leaves home to seek his fortune. Along the way he drinks, dances and tries to catch the eye of the lassies with his curious style, but he ends up beset by thieving tricksters and fighting off sneering bigots, saved at the end of the day thanks to his own kin who are on hand to join in the affray.
The song could very loosely describe the plot of the new film that it features in, Sinners. In Ryan Coogler’s American gothic, young blues prodigy Sammie ‘Preacher Boy’ Moore defies his father’s wishes and sets out to become a blues player, becomes a man amidst the drink and debauchery of the new juke joint set up by his criminally enterprising cousins the Smokestack Twins, and wards off a devilish vampire clan who desire the power of Sammie’s music to pierce the veil between worlds, the film’s cast of friends and family fighting to protect the boy and his gift at all costs. Whether you’re in the 19th century Irish midlands or the 1930s Deep South, it does pay to cut a stout blackthorn to banish ghosts and goblins, especially when creepy pale people show up in the dead of the night demanding to cross your threshold.
There are plenty of outstanding musical sequences in Coogler’s ambitious genre-flick, particularly a number where Preacher Boy plays so powerfully that he ‘pierces the veil’ and connects the juke joint to the past and future of their people, his Mississippi blues mixing with African drummers, a Hendrix-esque electric guitar player, hip hop DJs and Chinese theatre dancers. With the strongly smooth voice of gospel singer turned first-time actor Miles Caton, we feel the power of Preacher Boy’s music, and of all the musicians and dancers that it awakens across eras, a power drawn from how it is human, emotional, and immediate. It’s alive.
It’s those qualities that Jack O’Connell’s smooth-talking vampire villain Remmick wishes to claim. After the craic and community (and cash opportunity) of Smoke and Stack’s joyous juke joint has been well-established, Remmick and his newly made minions descend on it looking for a feed, growing their clan out of every corpse, but in particular looking to turn Sammie.
Remmick’s demonic soul is trapped on Earth, adrift and unable to pass on. He comes to the American South from old Ireland, and he’s desperate to connect once more with his long-withered roots. When he, and the newly blooded vampires who share his memories now they’re under his thrall, play Wild Mountain Thyme to tug on the heartstrings of Hailee Steinfeld’s mournful Mary, it’s a manipulative move, but Remmick comes by the song’s longing tone honestly. He’s a few centuries removed from seeing any summertime or blooming heather.
“I’m obsessed with Irish folk music, my kids are obsessed with it, my first name is Irish.
I think it’s not known how much crossover there is between African American culture and Irish culture, and how much that stuff is loved in our community.”
Ryan Coogler talks about the Irish music of Sinners on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast
Remmick is a sinister figure, a manipulator and brutal killer, but whenever the sad Irish strings kick in on Ludwig Göransson’s score, we understand perfectly what he wants. Cast out in time and cut off from any afterlife, Remmick needs the power of Preacher Boy to see his own people again, to feel what the people in the juke felt. “I want your stories, and I want your songs” he tells Preacher Boy, and he’ll kill every last one of our sinners to get them.
Having taken and turned the majority of the juke’s patrons into more of his creatures of the night, Remmick kicks off his own song and dance while the vampires keep Sammie and our other heroes under siege. The crowd of creatures starts clapping, the music starts playing, and Remmick launches into his own rendition of the Rocky Road to Dublin, Irish dancing as he goes rattlin’ o’er the bogs of the Mississippi Delta.
The ol’ Skins star O’Connell has the Irish roots you might expect from the name, his father hailing from Ballyheigue, and as well as recreating the Kerry lilt when needed in his performance, the actor tapped into his own childhood, where he competed in Irish dancing competitions, when rehearsing for this scene. O’Connell’s own love for Irish music passes through the screen into the form of his character’s committed, charismatic song and dance performance.
When I’d seen the traditional Irish music in there, that was the main thing I wanted to pick [Coogler’s] brains about, to be honest, because I couldn’t believe that I’d read it. I couldn’t believe that. I wanted to know what type [of Irish music] he was going to go for. Was it going to be the traditional sound? Like Dubliners, how they would sound?
And yeah, I love Luke Kelly — this traditional Irish music legend. So I thought, you know what? Hats off. My kids love Luke Kelly. My kids request Luke Kelly in the house. That music means a lot to me, my heritage. So to be having this conversation with a guy that’s thousands and thousands of miles away was incredible. For him to offer me that opportunity, I was like, “Say no more. Sign me up.”
Jack O’Connell speaks to the Hollywood Reporter about being cast in Sinners
Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw takes advantage of the IMAX cameras chosen by Coogler, the shallow focus of which starts to blur the background, smearing the dancers together, glowing eyes and jigging bodies spinning around Remmick. The camera moves with an ecstatic speed that matches the energy of the song. Quick cuts, swerving spins, the filmmaking reflects the ravenous nature of the vampires, caught up in an infectious and exciting reverie. No ancestors appear though. No descendants. A vampire can replicate and recreate, but the soul of the thing, that’s one vein that they can’t tap.
The craic of the céilí comes through clearly to the viewer, and likewise the Remmick’s offer for Preacher Boy, Smoke and the other survivors to give themselves up willingly and join the vampires has an understandable allure. He offers eternal life, and “fellowship and love” in the vampire clan, and the promises are particularly weighted when presented to those living under the hell of American racism.
With the vampires sharing memories, the turned Stack tells his twin for certain that the local Klan were coming to destroy what the brothers just built, that they were never going to be free, that their dream was built on a lie. Smoke is temporarily tempted, not only by the chance to be with his brother again, but to remove himself from the cycle of subjugation, violence and denial that he’s found again and again as a Black man in America – from Jim Crow, from the army, from crime in Chicago.
But the vampires’ indecent proposal is just another form of subjugation. It’s a promise that you can still have a bit of what’s yours, so long as you’re also ours, forever. Assimilate, utterly on our terms, or else. Remmick shares the memories of all the Black and Chinese Americans that he’s just converted and claimed, but their experiences are of no interest to him. He just wants the Preacher Boy’s gift for what it can offer himself, every deadly sin wrapped up in one drooling, hungry hellion.
Sammie, Smoke and co reject Remmick’s racket. Inside the juke, the people connected with Sammie’s songs through their shared experiences, their culture, and their own hankering need to have a good time. Outside, they joined Remmick’s feverish jig because his memories and motives were imprinted on them. They might even really enjoy it, but there’s no transcendence in it, no evolution possible, no real connection to a culture shared or otherwise. They can perform it perfectly, but it’s an isolated recreation, going through the motions without any heart. We saw what the connection they promise actually looks like inside the juke – Grace and Bo Chow, old associates of Smoke and Stack, are genuinely part of the community, and when Sammie performs, their culture comes alive alongside the African traditions that his music awakens.
The many Irish immigrants to America over the centuries have built lives and ties and communities over time. But there’s a complicated angle to the Irish migrant experience in the US, a splintered history of fluctuating status, formerly flexible on being counted as “White” under American prejudice, presently not prioritised as immigrants regardless of legality.
There are Irish in America, and every place we’ve ended up, that have grown something new and beautiful while keeping their connection to home – see O’Connell’s broad English accent describe his past as ‘Jumping Jack’ – those that have created the space for the crossover that Coogler describes. And then there are the ignorant imitators, who paint themselves as authentically Irish to bolt themselves onto something old, and white, and seemingly benign. At best they’re irritants stumbling to lay claim to something they don’t understand. At worst they threaten violence and domination of anyone that they don’t count as one of their number. One of these Paddy parodies was in the White House there not long ago, making his bold claims of fellowship and love on Ireland’s behalf.
In describing the meaning of Rocky Road to Dublin, the song’s original writer, a poet who went by D.K. Gavan, wrote in his pamphlet ‘Gems of Old Erin‘:
“This song is not intended as a caricature – quite the contrary. Our hero being a poor, hardworking Irishman, who, having no harvest of his own to reap in his native country, pays an annual visit to the “sister kingdom”, in order to oblige his neighbours there, and also to reap a golden harvest for himself. His humour under such adverse circumstances is quite characteristic, and it is not until he fancies the “ould sod” is calumniated that his worst passions are aroused.“
There’s only caricature in being a vampire, no matter how enticing a prospect it might first appear. When a terrified Sammie prays as Remmick looms over him, the vampire sneers that the same prayers brought comfort to him when colonisers imposed religion on his land, a salient point slightly diluted as he claws at Sammie’s face, literally dunking him in the waters outside the sawmill as he’s about to suck the life out of the boy, and cut him off from his own ould sod.
Remmick’s bloodthirsty coveting of the Preacher Boy and his gift comes to a pointy end courtesy of Smoke’s stake. His pain, shared by the coven he’s sired, pins all the vampires in place long enough for the sun to rise and destroy them all. His hopes of seeing his people again go up in flames, his grief a falling leaf at the dawning of the day.
Safe from the vampires, Sammie can clear the way for his own rocky road. He turns down his father’s call to reject his sinful music, and becomes a talented and successful blues legend. He even opens his own joint, a living connection to the place his cousins created for him, where for just a few hours they were truly free.
Sinners is about many things, but Coogler’s passion for maintaining an uncompromised connection to the culture is particularly poignant. It’s in the free and freely shared expression that the visitors to the Smokestack Twins juke experience immanence, where the divine overlaps with the mundane on the same plane. If you’ve ever heard a trad session start up inside a pub, and found yourself yelping and slapping your thigh unprompted, you might have felt a moment of something similar.
Your writing really sings and conjures emotion and nostalgia for a place I’ve never been to. Beautiful write-up for a masterful film.
Love this analysis. The soundtrack to this film worked so well- the rich blues, the wild traditional Irish, and those beautiful classic horror tones of choir and bells. Really is one to see in cinemas so you can benefit from decent speakers.
The only downside to this article is that it’s a full run down of the film, so I can’t use it to persuade people who haven’t seen it yet!