The perfect button on the jaw-dropping scene comes when it’s revealed that the revelers in the juke joint — and Sammie’s music in particular — have attracted the attention of some nomadic vampires, led by Remmick (Jack O’Connell). As the opening prologue of the film stated, these vampires aren’t merely after blood, but they also wish to consume and appropriate such transcendent art, literally and figuratively. As Remmick confesses to Sammie later, he needs to absorb the musicians’ power in order to use it to contact his own long-dead ancestors and loved ones; due to his immortal nature, he’s unspeakably lonely. While the portrayal of a vampire as a primarily lonely figure is nothing new in the creature’s mythos, what is intriguingly fresh about Coogler’s conception of the creature is how the vampires aren’t misunderstood or secretly moral. These are some of the most compellingly nuanced vampires seen in any horror film, and Coogler is careful not to rigidly define them to make their seductiveness that much more powerful.
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To wit, this isn’t a riff on “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” where an encroaching force seeks to subsume and quell all instances of humanity. Later in the film, Coogler offers up a companion musical number to Sammie’s performance, a scene in which the vampire horde performs their own music and dance to it with abandon. Although the scene is just as lively and just as infused with emotion as the earlier number, the key difference lies in the way the vampires operate. It’s revealed that, despite each individual vampire insisting that they retain their human identity, they are all in thrall to the feelings of the vampire who made them, namely Remmick. Thus, the song they’re happily dancing to is one from Remmick’s past and upbringing, not their own. So, in this comparison, Coogler is showing us the difference between personal art, which primarily speaks to an individual (yet which can also be related to by myriad of other folks), and art which is deemed significant by an outside authority, whether that be a corporation, a cultural consensus, or otherwise.
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As its title heavily suggests, “Sinners” is a film about people with imperfections, vampires or not. As in life, no one is wholly good, and no one is wholly bad, but all must constantly choose which path they’re going to follow, and why. It is a piece of art which allows for genre escapism yet takes an honest look at a period in our country’s past, and thus makes us question our own morals and motives. It is, in essence, a collective experience that stems from a personal inspiration, and Coogler brilliantly condenses that goal into the film’s signature scene. Like any film, song, painting, or novel with rich layers, there’s a lot for us to discover within it, both as a collective and as ourselves.
“Sinners” is now playing in theaters everywhere.
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