This post contains mild spoilers for Sinners.
Sinners is a movie unafraid to look silly. The vampire epic is Ryan Coogler’s “one for me” after nearly a decade in the Marvel trenches, and it has the feel of a filmmaker following his muse, whether that means three separate depictions of or references to cunnilingus, a moment where Hailee Steinfeld gives Michael B. Jordan the full Disobedience, or the scene that even at this early date is being hailed as Sinners’s standout sequence. The film’s opening narration tells of musicians so skilled that they have the power to pierce the veil between life and death. Thus, when secret protagonist Sammie (Miles Caton) takes the stage at the film’s Depression-era juke joint, the power of his blues is enough to summon a spiritual lineage of Black music — West African dancers, hip-hop DJs, a Jimi Hendrix look-alike wailing on the guitar. “For a moment, this blend of past, present, and future touches transcendence,” our own Angelica Jade Bastién writes. An earnest act of imagination that’s also unapologetically goofy, it’s not the kind of scene you can write if you’re afraid of eye rolls.
This is not a post about that scene. This is a post about a scene that’s somehow even sillier. Because if you thought Coogler was going to stop at spectral B-boys communing with the ancestors, he’s got an even bolder move up his sleeve, an idea that practically dares the viewer to stop taking the movie seriously. I’m talking about the Riverdancing vampires.
Now, technically, only one of the film’s vampires performs an Irish step dance. He’s Remmick (Jack O’Connell), a villain of vaguely Celtic origin who gets the whole vampire party going by turning a KKK member and his wife in the opening scenes. (One of the film’s funniest conceits is that, after this, the white vampires always speak in the language of interracial brotherhood.) Sinners studiously adheres to the rules of vampire lore, which means Remmick and his crew are unable to enter the heroes’ juke joint unless specifically invited. So instead, they spend much of the film hanging around outside, feeding on anyone unlucky enough to wander into their path and trying to lure innocents with dulcet folk tunes, which has the knock-on effect of making Sinners by far the best movie of the 2020s to feature characters singing “Wild Mountain Thyme.”
Things continue in this vein until the climax, when Remmick has bitten enough humans to have an entire vampire gang. Now it’s his turn to throw a party, a full-on Irish hoedown. Remmick croons a credible version of “The Rocky Road to Dublin” while his vampire spawn hoots and hollers. Then he busts out some step dancing! Coogler devotes just as much care and attention to this scene as he did the earlier blues sequence, to the point where you wonder if he’s going to pull the same trick again and summon the ghosts of Bono and Enya in a vision of Irish Excellence.
That turns out not to be the case — Sammie is apparently the only character capable of piercing the veil, which explains why Remmick is hunting him in particular. It’s a long way to Tipperary, and the ageless vamp wants to see his long-lost countrymen again. Still, it’s a trip to see Irish step dancing, which since the days of Michael Flatley tends to mostly show up as a joke in American movies, presented with such reverence. The vampire audience, which at this point includes a couple characters who canonically have good taste, absolutely eats it up. So does Coogler. “The Rocky Road to Dublin” is a hop jig, meaning it has a 9/8 time signature, the source of Irish music’s “diddly-dee” vibe. In his editing and camera movement, the director is attuned to the song’s distinctive rhythm. Without putting too fine a point on it, you can feel the line he’s drawing between this music and the African music at the center of the film: two musical cultures drawn from folk traditions, powered by pulsing beats, and marginalized by those in authority.
The particular trick of Sinners is to realize that you can have all this while still laughing at the objectively absurd sight of step-dancing vampires. In this film, seriousness and unseriousness comingle. I laughed, but you know what? At that moment, I was also quite moved by the power of the diddly-dee.