Spoilers ahead for “Sinners.”
2025 hasn’t even hit blockbuster or Oscar season yet, but Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” is already looking like the movie of the year. It’s a remarkable film, and rave reviews plus a remarkable box office performance indicate most would agree with me.
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Set in the Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale in 1932, “Sinners” follows Black twins Elijah “Smoke” and Elias “Stack” Moore (Michael B. Jordan as both), who are known collectively and notoriously as the “Smokestack Twins.” Having made a small fortune working for (and then robbing) gangsters in Chicago, the twins are opening their own juke joint in an attempt to carve out a little slice of Heaven for the local Black community. Their guitar-playing cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), the son of a devout preacher, helps draw in the crowds with his preternatural music skills. But the night turns into Hell when Sammie’s spectacular strumming catches the ear of some wandering vampires, led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell).
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Remmick affects a Southern American accent, but he’s actually an Irishman and lets his true brogue slip a few times — like the scene where he leads his new thralls in a chorus of “The Rocky Road to Dublin.” As “Sinners” shows, the Ku Klux Klan besieged the Black people of 1930s Mississippi. It would’ve been an easy creative choice to make those people the film’s vampire villains — so why is an Irish outsider the leader instead?
The modern vampire has Irish roots; Bram Stoker, author of “Dracula,” was an Irishman. “Dracula” has been widely interpreted as a story about the fear of foreign invasion, and in “Sinners” that invader comes from the same land Stoker did. Both Coogler and O’Connell have also spoken about their love for Irish culture and music on the “Sinners” press tour. (O’Connell is English, but his father was from Ireland, and he learned traditional Irish dancing as a kid — skills he gets to show off in the film.)
“My understanding [is that Ireland’s] biggest export is people,” said O’Connell to GQ. “Just to understand the influence that had on the American south at this particular time, and how that found its way into the music there, was something I know that Ryan’s savvy to, and I think part of the reason for Remmick being from Ireland.”
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“I’m obsessed with Irish folk music, my kids are obsessed with it, [and] my first name is Irish,” Coogler himself explained in an interview with Indiewire. “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.”
Indeed, African Americans and Irish-Americans are communities that started at similar points but took two different paths. “Sinners” distils those intersecting histories into a pressure-cooker horror tale.
