The siren song of "Sinners" vampires

By Lynn Lee   

[Warning: SPOILERS]  

Sinners has a secret hiding in plain sight, and it’s not the vampires. You'll have the chance to see this delightful surprise for yourself (if you haven't already) when Sinners arrives on HBO/Max on July 5.  Sinners isn’t really – or at least isn't exclusively – a horror movie.  At its core it’s a musical, and a thumping good one at that.  Or, as one review headline put it: “Finally, A Transcendental Southern Gothic Vampire Musical Blockbuster.”

I would never have predicted that combination of words could describe a Ryan Coogler movie, yet here we are.  Joking aside, it’s as apt a tribute as any to the impressive scope and ambition of his cinematic moonshot...

Sinners throws together vampires, blues musicians, twin bootleggers, estranged lovers, hoodoo charms, and a rich slice of 1930s Mississippi Delta history, topped off with a Tarantino-esque treatment of the KKK as a dramatic chaser.  Even if the film at times feels a bit thematically overstuffed, the key through-line that keeps it all connected and cohesive is the music. 

Coogler’s go-to Ludwig Göransson composed the score and curated and collaborated on the rest of the soundtrack, a mesmerizing musical tapestry of traditional and modern blues, gospel, and multiple other genres, from folk to funk to literal Irish step dancing.  More than just background or mood-setting, the music drives the narrative and illuminates its underlying racial and historical subtext.  Yes, that’s in large part because the narrative is structured around the fate of one supernaturally talented blues musician (Miles Caton) yearning to escape the Jim Crow South.  But Sinners is about more than him; it’s as much, if not more, about the forces he channels. 

There’s been a fair amount of discourse already, and deservedly, on the film’s musical centerpiece (“I Lied to You”), a tour de force in which Caton’s Sammie summons not just hungry vampires but the musical spirits of past, present, and future.  Others have also commented on the glorious absurdity of another sequence that’s its exact spiritual and musical opposite – the aforementioned step-dancing hootenanny, set to the traditional Irish tune “Rocky Road to Dublin.” But the pair of musical numbers that have lingered the most strongly with me are much quieter and stranger and, for that very reason, even more haunting.  In both, the vampires are trying to use music to gain entry to the juke joint where Sammie’s been tearing it up.  The two performances couldn’t be more different from one another – except in their deep, deep uncanniness. 

The first attempt is the first time Sammie and his friends lay eyes on the lead vampire, Remmick (Jack O’Connell), and the cohorts he recently turned, married couple Bert (Peter Dreimanis) and Joan (Lola Kirke).  Remmick introduces them as traveling musicians seeking to commune with musical kindred spirits, notwithstanding that they’re white and everyone in the juke joint is a person of color.  Met with an unsurprisingly frosty reception, the trio strike up a song to prove their bona fides.  The song, “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” is at once the weirdest and most perfect choice they could have landed on.  Originally a blues song, here it’s given a full-on folk/country treatment, complete with twangy banjo that only amplifies the contrast between the jaunty melody and the head-scratching lyrics: 

I picked poor Robin clean, picked poor Robin clean
I picked his head, picked his feet
I woulda picked his body but it wasn’t fit to eat
Picked poor Robin clean, picked poor Robin clean
And I’ll be satisfied having a family. 

The closest to an explanation I’ve seen of the song’s meaning is that it has something to do with gambling or conning.  In the mouths of the vampires, however, the chorus gains an additional, chilling layer of sinister premonitory significance, right down to their being satisfied having a family.  Perhaps their audience senses this; at any rate, their effort goes over like the proverbial lead balloon, though they do manage to impress Stack, the more outgoing of the twin owners played by Michael B. Jordan, whose head-bopping appreciation of their musical chops injects a comic note into an otherwise tense moment.  He’s overruled, however, by his more suspicious brother Smoke, who tells the robin-picking weirdos to get gone.   

Undeterred, the vampire folk trio simply camp out a short distance away, biding their time and waiting for their prey to come to them.  And before long it does, in the form of Stack’s ex-lover Mary (Hailee Steinfeld), who happens to be particularly vulnerable given her liminal status (she’s mixed-race but can pass for white) and fragile emotional state (her mother just died, and she’s still in love with Stack).  She’s ripe for the picking, and this time the vampires apply just the right touch.  

This scene was the most surreal sensory experience I’ve had at a movie in a very long time.  As viewers who have already seen Remmick’s dirty work, we’re bracing for an attack on the unsuspecting Mary.  Yet as she approaches, all we see and hear are musicians delivering a gorgeous rendition of “Wild Mountain Thyme,” a traditional Scottish/Irish folk song (to be precise, originally Scottish but adapted and first recorded by an Irish musician, which in itself is an interesting choice for the Irish-identifying Remmick.) It’s wistful and tender; suffused with nostalgia without being cloying; a little melancholy, and a little hopeful.  It’s exactly what someone in Mary’s shoes would want to hear, and succeeds in getting her to drop her guard. 

But not ours!  We know what’s coming, and the eerie lighting of the performers, casting their eyes in deep shadows, only heightens the sense of suspended horror.  And yet there’s such a jarring dissonance between the crystalline harmonies in our ears and the uncanny visuals before our eyes, it’s hard not to wonder how something that sounds so pure and true can feel so wrong and perverted.  It’s basically the horror-movie version of the Sirens’ serenade in O Brother, Where Art Thou? (which, incidentally, would make a banging double-bill with Sinners). 

Once the music stops, the mood shifts to more overt menace and the first true jump-scare of the movie.  Still, for my money none of the mayhem that follows can match either of the performances that preceded it for sheer unnerving effect.  I don’t know that they were intended to convey any deeper message beyond the almost too facile metaphorical link between vampirism and cultural appropriation that Sinners flirts with and complicates as much as it embraces.  But the more subversive subtext might be: if it’s good enough and seductive enough, people won’t see – or care about – the appropriation.  They’ll open their hearts and let it right in.